Monday, October 31, 2016

Donald Trump gatecrashed HIV kids charity event without giving a single penny

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
A report has raised question over Donald Trump’s claims of philanthropy.

 
Contacting more than 420 charities with a connection to Trump, The Post found he had given just one personal gift, of less than $10,000, since 2008. 

In one of the most disturbing accounts, the story recalls how Trump gatecrashed a 1996 ribbon-cutting for a school for HIV-positive children run by the Association to Benefit Children.

Mr Trump turned up uninvited and forced his way into the limelight at the event, taking a seat in front of the cameras reserved for a major donor – without giving a single penny.

Hillary Clinton said: “Yesterday the Washington Post published a report that was truly stunning. It starts with the story of a ribbon-cutting back in 1996 for a nursery school serving children living with HIV and AIDS in New York. 

“Now, let me say, this is important in part to remember. This is a story about children with HIV and AIDS. So there was a big celebration honouring the donors who had supported the nursery school, and all the kids and their families, for whom this was the most important thing you can imagine.

“Because you know, back in the ‘90s, some of you remember. Right? Children weren’t welcomed in school. 

“And then, unannounced and uninvited, guess who barges in? Donald Trump. He walks right up to the stage. He sat down in the seat that was being saved for a local developer who had made a generous donation. 

“None of the people working for the charity knew why he was there. He wasn’t a donor at all. He had never given a single dollar to help build the school. He just wanted people to think he had. So he sat on the stage through the program, even posed for photographs, and when it was over, he got up and walked out.

“No explanation. No donation. Now really, who does that? What kind of person does that? Really?

“I mean, who pretends to help kids with HIV and AIDS in order to make themselves look good?”

The Post’s investigation confirmed Trump had never given to 420 charitable causes he was linked to – including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the AIDS Service Center and the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

In recent weeks, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly attacked her rival’s shifting stances on LGBT rights.

In a bid to attract support from evangelicals, Trump has claimed he would “consider” appointing ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices to repeal equal marriage, come out in favour of North Carolina’s anti-trans law, and confirmed he would sign a Republican-backed bill to directly permit religious homophobic discrimination – while his running mate Mike Pence has confirmed he would dismantle Barack Obama’s protections for LGBT people.

Read more articles from PINK News, here.

No Cure Yet, But More Proof Kick and Kill May Eventually End HIV


October 10 2016
 
 
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According to a Times of London story, British researchers are on “the brink of a cure,”  but as many advocates remind us, the mainstream media (especially in the U.K.) likes to use "cure" in headlines prematurely. Here's what we do know: This recent study was merely more proof that the “kick and kill” strategy may be successful, but final findings won’t be done until 2018. 

The technique in this latest study involves using a drug called Vorinostat, that activates dormant ­T-cells. “The cells infec­ted with HIV start pro­du­cing viral proteins that pro­trude from their outer mem­branes — acting like a flag for killer cells that then destroy them,” according to researchers. 

The drugs literally attach and kill the HIV cells.

The coalition behind this study includes five leading British universities — Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, University College London, and King’s College London — all part of a  medical consortium working under the  National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infra­structure for the first time in history. Managing director Mark Samuela told reporters, “This is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV. We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV. This is a huge challenge and it’s still early days but the progress has been remarkable.”

Encouraging cautious optimism, Ian Green, chief executive of the HIV organization Terrence Higgins Trust, which runs the hospital Prince Harry recently visited, said: “There is still no cure for HIV and we welcome this ambitious study which looks to eradicate the virus completely from the bodies of people living with HIV, instead of suppress­ing it.” 

Doctors involved in the study noted that time is still needed to determine if the "Kick and Kill" therapy eliminated the virus in his system or whether his current antiretro viral therapy may be causing the virus to be undetectable on its own.

Read more articles from PLUS, here.
 

Prince Harry Continues HIs Mother's HIV Work


September 15 2016
 
 
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 Earlier this year Prince Harry got an HIV test on camera to raise awareness —  taking the rapid quick test on Facebook Live, an event that garnered over two million views, to show people how easy it is to know your status. Now the Prince of Wales has continued his work, by visiting the same hospital his mother did in 1989.

In the first decade of the HIV epidemic, when stigma and misinformation were still rampant, Princess Diana publicly supported people with HIV.  She visited the Mildmay Hospital in East London, which has become Europe's leading specialist in treating patients with HIV-related illness. On her historic visit 27 years ago, Diana kissed a patient dying of AIDS related complications. In an era where many people still believed you could get HIV through causual contact, her act was a brave act against stigma.  

Just as Diana changed many people’s perception of the disease, Prince Harry is now doing the same, embracing his mother’s legacy in de-stigmatizing the disease. According to Sky News Harry told the hospital’s fundraising manager Kerry Reeves-Kneip, that it was a “big deal” when his mother did so. Reeves-Kneip added, "She came at such an important time, around this area local barbers wouldn't cut staff's hair [because they treated patients with HIV]. She really did break down the stigma."




 People Magazine reported that Harry "Is continuing to learn more about HIV as a virus, and he was able to talk to them about his work on testing, which he is very interested in." 




Read more articles from PLUS, here.

The Fight Against AIDS Stigma Is Far from Over, Activists Say

AIDS activist Peter Staley is arrested after demonstrating for better access to HIV drugs outside Astra Pharmaceuticals, Westborough, Massachusetts in 1989. Joe Smiddy / Staley

Peter Staley was at the top of his game when AIDS took off in New York City in the 1980s. He was a Wall Street bond trader and didn't think the rumor about a disease affecting gay men was anything he needed to worry about. 

He certainly never could have predicted that it would consume his life. 

"I was a closeted gay man," Staley, 55, told NBC News. "I was completely disconnected from the established but mostly closeted gay community that existed in New York that was doing the early struggling against this new epidemic." 

Gaetan Dugas died of AIDS in 1984. Rand Gaynor
Now the HIV pandemic is more than 30 years old, and a new study out this week has put what one expert calls the final nail in the coffin of the idea that a single flight attendant carried HIV across the U.S. Instead, the study shows the virus probably arrived in New York City from the Caribbean around 1970, spreading to San Francisco in 1976 and then to the world. 

Related: Genetic Study Shows HIV Came to New York in 1970
 
The report clears the name of Canadian Gaetan Dugas, who died in 1984 after helping Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigators track down HIV. 

"It's shocking how this man's name has been sullied and destroyed by this incorrect history. He was not 'Patient Zero' and this study confirms it through genetic analysis," said Staley, who is currently teaching political activism at the Institute of Politics 

at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. 

Many Americans expressed horror at the image of an attractive, young, gay flight attendant flying around the world spreading a deadly virus through hundreds — by his own description — of sexual liaisons. The case cast the HIV epidemic even more strongly as a punishment for what many viewed as a sinful lifestyle. 

Sean Strub isn't surprised by the findings. Strub, who founded POZ magazine, is another survivor of the early AIDS epidemic who understands the stigma then and now has little to do with scientific reality. 

"The neglect and the governmental indifference started long before the epidemic was recognized," Strub told NBC News. 



From then-President Ronald Reagan on down, no one sounded an alarm about a surge in deaths from a mysterious infectious disease. Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes openly joked about it.
 
The nonchalance allowed the epidemic to fester. 

"It didn't set off any alarm bells to a young closeted gay man in New York in 1983. And for that I am furious," Staley said. "I mostly likely became infected that summer." 

Staley studied political activism on the streets. 

"America was just letting thousands of its citizens die because of bigotry and hatred," Staley said. 

Strub and Staley both learned they were HIV positive in 1985. "I found out right after Rock Hudson died," Staley said. "There were panics going on. Rumors would appear that a child had HIV in a school system and parents would pull their kids out of the school." 

Related: Actor Rock Hudson's Death Shifted AIDS conversation 
 
Staley at first worked as a bond trader by day and an activist by night. He joined a new group called the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) but got sicker and sicker and finally quit his job. 

"The next week, I got arrested. I did my first demo with ACT UP," Staley said. "I got 10 arrests during my time in ACT UP. We became the movement of our age. We became the Occupy, the Black Lives Matter of the 80s." 


 


They shut down the New York Stock Exchange and covered the home of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms with a giant condom. 



AIDS activist Peter Staley in 2014. Staley, infected

at the beginning of the HIV epidemic in New York

in the mid 1980s, quit his job as a Wall Street

bond broker and has been a prominent advocate

for testing and treatment ever since. 
Sean Black / Staley


The articulate, passionate and highly educated leaders of groups such as ACT UP forced a change in U.S. policies and transformed the research agenda. "By 1990, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) was spending over a billion dollars a year on AIDS research," Staley said. "We guilt-ripped the whole country into finally reacting." 

Now there are more than two dozen HIV drugs. While there's no cure for HIV, cocktails of these drugs can control it almost completely, and they've been reformulated into once- or twice-a day pills. People who take them can control the virus so well they almost never infect anyone else. 

Related: Daily Pills Protect People Against HIV
Strub was pulled back from the brink himself, with a ravaged immune system and covered with lesions from Kaposi's sarcoma, when researchers learned they could combine HIV drugs for powerful effect in 1996. It transformed the world for HIV patients, who no longer faced certain death. 

"Most of us didn't think we'd live to see the fruit of our activism," Staley said. 

HIV research has gone mainstream and work on a vaccine gets funding and attention. But Strub and Staley say their fight is far from over. 

"While we have incredibly effective medical treatments, we don't have a pill to cure stigma," said Strub, who is 58. "And HIV-related stigma is worse today than it has ever been." 
 
Now Strub fights against criminalization of HIV patients as director of The Sero Project

"Today, with disclosure, you risk losing your job. You risk partner violence. Women fear disclosing for fear of losing her children," said Strub. 





Strub's group fights laws that make it a crime for an HIV-positive person to have sex with anyone without disclosing it — laws they say that have been abused by angry ex-partners, who can accuse HIV patients who have no way of proving whether they disclosed. 

These laws, and a continued high level of discrimination among the general public, have driven the HIV epidemic underground, Strub says. People resist getting tested for fear of being prosecuted later. "The evidence is these laws are harming public health," he said. 

"Infections are at an all-time high among gay men," he added. "The rates are rising among young gay men of color." Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm this. 

The CDC reports that, at current rates, one in six men who have sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes. Gay and bisexual men in Southern cities are at the highest risk

"We are not surrounded with the same kind of death and dying that was such a part of our daily lives. But that has helped erase it from the public's consciousness," Strub said. "It isn't fashionable any more. But it is still very much a crisis. And many communities have been utterly neglected." 

Related: Gay, Bisexual Black men have 50 Percent HIV Risk
 
Staley says the worsening political divide in the United States has taken the epidemic in new directions. "The stigma is as bad as ever," he said. "I call it Red AIDS and Blue AIDS." 

In mostly Democratic areas of the country — large cities in the Northeast and California — state health departments are pushing widespread HIV testing and treatment that have pushed new infections down. 

Staley said Washington, D.C., has seen a 40 percent drop in the past decade, while San Francisco has seen a 50 percent drop in the past decade. 

"In these blue areas of the country that are using the current scientific tools, we are seeing great progress. It is the red areas, especially the deep South, where the epidemic is either flat or getting worse," he said. 

Related: Southern, Urban Gay Men More Likely to Have HIV
 
Republican-led states have fought some of the innovations proven to slow the spread of HIV and other infections. For instance, Indiana bans needle exchanges, although last year Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican now running for vice president, issued an executive order allowing temporary needle exchanges after an outbreak of HIV among injecting drug users in his state. 

Related: CDC Says Urgent Action Needed in Indiana
 
"It's frustrating when you have these tools and large parts of the country are not using them at all," Staley said. "Lives are being lost because we just don't have the money and the political will to make it work." 

In the United States, more than 1.2 million people have HIV, and about 50,000 people are newly infected each year. 

"It is back like the 1980s again, where apathy and ignorance and stigma are just letting the epidemic rage on," Staley said. "I am an AIDS activist still and trying to finish the job we started in the late 1980s." 

This article orginally found on NBC News

Protected from HIV, ‘elite controllers’ still fight for cure

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

Kai Brothers (center), who has HIV but no signs of AIDS, waits for the BART train.

October 28, 2016
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Lucky Choi has been thinking about making music again.

He’s played piano, at times professionally, his whole life. But he stopped composing original pieces in the early 1990s. The last time he wrote something of his own, he was in Paris, just before his partner died of AIDS. He found, in the aftermath of that loss, that he had lost the desire to compose.

“The last piece I wrote was in his home. I stopped after that,” said Choi, who will turn 60 next month, from his home in San Francisco. “Music was always what gave me the most feeling of being alive.”


That he is still alive, still healthy, still able to make music if he is inspired, is in his view “a miracle.” Choi is HIV-positive, like his partner who died more than 20 years ago and his partner now. He was infected, he thinks, in the late 1970s, when he was in his early 20s and new to San Francisco.

But there’s something different about Choi. Unlike his partners, he’s never been sick from HIV and has never taken drugs to treat it. The virus is detectable in his blood only in the most sensitive of lab tests.

Choi is what’s known as an “elite controller.” His immune system, by some twist of genetics, is able to naturally fend off HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Scientists believe about 1 in 100 people have this natural resistance — and some researchers think they may be a key to curing HIV.
But to live with HIV amid the plague of AIDS wasn’t easy, even for those who didn’t get sick. Many lived for years in constant fear that they, too, would die. For some, the realization that they were going to survive was isolating, or even guilt-inducing. And being essentially immune from HIV did not protect them from the tsunami of loss that rolled over their generation.

Now, these survivors are among thousands of men and women in the United States who have lived for 20 years or longer with HIV. Nationally, more than half of all people living with HIV are age 50 or older; in San Francisco, the number exceeds 60 percent. 


Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle
_________________________________________________________________________________
 Lucky Choi, 59, who thinks he was infected with HIV in the late 1970s but is able to naturally fend off the virus, smiles after getting his blood drawn in Dr. Jay Levy’s office at UCSF. 
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Like hundreds of other elite controllers in the U.S., Choi has participated for decades in medical studies that aim to understand how his immune system works, in hopes that the knowledge might lead to a cure for HIV. Every month, he visits the UCSF offices of Dr. Jay Levy to give blood, from which doctors obtain snapshots of the virus and his immune function.



 
Levy, whose lab was among the first in the world to identify HIV as the cause of AIDS, has been working with elite controllers since the mid-1980s, when he started noticing that some of his patients weren’t getting sick, even as their friends and partners fell ill. 
Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle
Dr. Jay Levy demonstrates how he checks the vital signs of patient Lucky Choi, 59, who has HIV but no signs of AIDS,  

“I learned very early in my career, if you want to understand a viral infection, look at the survivors,” Levy said.

So when a man arrived in his office in 1984, saying he was certain he was positive but also puzzled to be healthy, Levy knew he had someone special. Over the years, he built a cohort of such men, and women, and produced dozens of papers on them. But the path toward a discovery, and ultimately a cure, has been more complicated than anyone expected.

Scientists are still trying to work out exactly how the immune system of an elite controller operates. Their understanding is that, in these patients, a certain immune cell is powerfully attuned to controlling HIV: It kills most of the virus and prevents what remains from replicating out of control and causing harm.

Because so little of the virus circulates in their bodies, elite controllers are unlikely to infect others, but they still must take precautions.

Just how well protected these patients are seems to vary. Some stave off HIV symptoms for two decades before getting sick, while others have been infected for 30 or more years and are still healthy. Increasingly, as they age, elite controllers have started taking HIV drugs to prevent the possibility of becoming sick.

For years in the 1990s and early 2000s, scientists focused largely on harnessing what they learned about elite controllers into developing a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. When those attempts failed, many scien
 
But a few scientists stuck with the elites, convinced that what their bodies were able to do naturally was too important to ignore. Their work has since shifted toward finding a cure.
“We’ve just scratched the surface of this research,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, a professor in the UCSF division of HIV/AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital who has built his own cohort of elite controllers.


Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

Patient Lucky Choi, 59, who has HIV but no signs of AIDS, gets his blood drawn in Dr. Jay Levy’s office at UCSF. 

These volunteers have made “heroic” contributions, Deeks said. Some have been engaged for decades — donating blood once a month and offering spinal fluid and tissue samples, too.

“The people who survived that early period of the epidemic, they lost many of their loved ones and friends and sometimes their entire social support system,” Deeks said. “They’re really motivated now through altruism, to try to figure out what happened.”



People infected with HIV in the 1980s presumed they would die within a few years. They had little reason to believe otherwise. And the elite controllers had no way of knowing there was anything special about them. So even as they remained healthy, many spent years waiting for their turn to come. 
 “One of my best friends, he got infected about the same time I did. He started to get sick, he started declining, and I was in a panic,” said George Fox, now 60 and living in Sacramento. “But I had to stop and think, ‘Why am I doing this to myself? Bill’s getting sick and I’m not. And that’s good.’

“For me,” he said, “it was a double-edged sword.”


Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

 Kai Brothers (left), who has HIV but no signs of AIDS, watches a presidential debate with boyfriend Brian Walters.


Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

Dr. Jay Levy has been studying “elite controllers” since an HIV-positive but healthy man walked into his office in 1984.


Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

 Kai Brothers (center), who has HIV but no signs of AIDS rides the Muni bus home from work.



Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

 Kai Brothers, who has HIV but no signs of AIDS, finishes up at work in downtown San Francisco.



When Fox’s doctor prescribed him AZT, the early antiretroviral drug that was the first to treat HIV but proved widely unsuccessful and often toxic, Fox refused to take it. He framed the prescription and hung it on a wall instead, taking it with him as he moved from place to place in the 1980s and ’90s. He’s never taken any drugs to treat HIV.

Fox joined Levy’s elite controllers study in the late 1990s, when he decided there was something different about him. His best friend had died of AIDS by then, and so had a longtime partner. But other than a bout of bad thrush — a painful rash in his mouth — shortly after he was infected, Fox remained abashedly healthy.

As time went on, he began to feel guilty. He had a career and a home. He’d never been sick, and he didn’t need the drugs that in their earliest iterations made those with HIV so ill. 

Around him, friends were “dropping like flies,” Fox said. Survivors would sit around trading traumatic stories — of near-death experiences, gruesome infections, debilitating drug side effects — and Fox would just listen, awkwardly unable to participate.

“Oh my God, the survivor’s guilt kicked in,” Fox said. “People around you are getting sick, and you start to feel like you should share that with them.”

For many, there’s a sort of identity built around being HIV-positive, especially among long-term survivors who endured the worst of the epidemic. These “poz” men and women banded together, building a community based not only on shared grief and horrors but resiliency.

Many elite controllers, though, say they don’t feel fully connected to the HIV-positive community. They certainly don’t identify as HIV-negative: They’ve feared for their lives at times, and faced the stigma of being among the infected. But much of the experience of being positive doesn’t resonate with them. And that can be isolating, some said.

“It’s like being between two worlds,” said Kai Brothers, 54, another participant in Levy’s elite controller group. “I never really felt a part of that world of somebody who is HIV-positive. I didn’t have anything going on that would relate me to what the others had to endure.”

Choi felt a little more connected — largely, he thinks, because he spent years as a caretaker for the sick during the epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s. He didn’t have time to be afraid for his own health, he said, because he was too busy looking after others in San Francisco’s hard-hit gay community.

“It was my escape,” he said — a distraction, but also a way to feel useful.

He became particularly adept at sitting with young men who were dying, easing them through their last breaths and consoling families who couldn’t understand what was happening to their sons and brothers.

In this time of crisis, Choi, who’d studied music for years, chose not to pursue a doctoral degree. He invested himself instead in caring for friends and, later, educating people in marginalized communities on how to protect themselves from HIV.

Like many other longtime survivors, he made decisions in his youth — based in part on assumptions that he would soon die — that he second-guesses now as he approaches 60.
“I don’t regret what I did with that time,” said Choi. But years later, he wonders whether he “really missed my calling in life. I had high ambitions for myself.”



For Brothers, turning to science — in particular, volunteering his blood and his body to Levy — helped him assuage the isolation he sometimes felt. It made him feel connected, knowing there were others like him. 
 But eventually his time, too, began to run out. As he’d always feared, his immune system weakened. After more than two decades living with HIV, the virus started to win.

He was startled by the rush of disappointment he felt following those first bad blood results two years ago.

“I had to realize, that’s not me anymore. I’m not infallible,” Brothers said. “I’m not this super being that can just fight off disease forever.”

For the first time in his life, Brothers was prescribed medication to treat HIV. Today, he’s as healthy as ever.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday
 

 

 
Health Reporter





 
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NYC AIDS Memorial Is Almost Finished

On September 2016, construction nears completion on The New York City AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle. Trenton Straube

Public dedication is slated for World AIDS Day, Dec. 1.

October 31, 2016


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As the New York City AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle nears completion, supporters of the project celebrated with a reception at Barneys New York. A public dedication for the memorial is scheduled for World AIDS Day, December 1, according to a press release from the memorial.

The memorial is located in a Greenwich Village park across from what used to be St. Vincent’s Hospital, the ground zero of the AIDS crisis in the early years of the epidemic.

The memorial’s board of directors and Barneys New York hosted the reception, which included the memorial’s cofounders, Christopher Tepper and Paul Kelterborn, and visual artist Jenny Holzer, who designed a section of the memorial made of granite engraved with selections from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”  

Also at the reception was the unveiling of a limited-edition print by Kobi Benezri to honor the memorial. You can view and purchase it here. Proceeds go to the memorial’s educational programs.

“We are grateful to the many supporters and donors who helped to make the New York City AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle a reality,” said Keith Fox, president of the memorial’s board of directors, in the press release. “Through their generosity, we have raised more than $6 million over five years for the design, construction and maintenance of the Memorial, as well as educational programs.”

To read more about Jenny Holzer’s memorial design and view renderings of the completed memorial, read the POZ blog post “Love Ya, Walt Whitman, But Does ‘Leaves of Grass’ Belong on an AIDS Memorial?” and visit nycaidsmemorial.org.

  
From left: Keith Fox, president of the New York City AIDS Memorial’s board of directors, with memorial cofounders Christopher Tepper and Paul Keiterborn at a reception at Barneys New York to celebrate the monument’s near completion.Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com


Artist Jenny Holzer, who designed part of The New York City AIDS Memorial, with
Keith Fox, president of the memorial's board of directors, at a reception at Barneys
New York to celebrate the imminent completion of the memorial.
Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com


A sample of the memorial’s official branding.

Read more articles from POZ, here.