University of California San Francisco
Give to UCSF
Adults with HIV in rural sub-Saharan Africa who receive antiretroviral drugs early in their infection may reap benefits in their ability to work and their children's ability to stay in school, according to a first-of-its-kind clinical study in Uganda that compared socioeconomic outcomes with CD4+ counts — a standard measure of health status for people with HIV.
<p>John Greenspan, BDS, PhD, considers himself naturally curious. When he started seeing a rare form of cancer of the lymphatoid system in young San Francisco men during the early 1980s, he was intrigued.</p>
<p><span>Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sharon Stone, Kathleen Sebelius, Bill Gates and Elton John are a few of the headliners to speak this week at AIDS 2012, the XIX International AIDS Conference, which runs through July 27 in Washington, D.C.</span></p>
<p>A perspective published in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine</em> this week by professors at UCSF and the Johns Hopkins University asserts that it is now possible to begin to end the AIDS epidemic by widely and strategically applying existing tools.</p>
<p>The AIDS drug Truvada, approved this week for prevention of HIV infection in uninfected people at high risk, may benefit many uninfected women whose male partners have HIV, including pregnant women, who may be at higher risk.</p>
<p>The year 1982 was pivotal for Paul Volberding, MD. In the early days of the AIDS crisis, he was a talented research fellow who was getting ready to help launch San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center’s Ward 86, which would become the world’s first HIV/AIDS outpatient clinic. It opened its doors the following year.</p>
<p>On the eve of the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., UCSF's Jay Levy paused recently to reflect on HIV — a disease that has defined a generation, continues to plague the world and may yet be vanquished.</p>
<p><em>Time </em>magazine has named Gladstone and UCSF scientist Robert Grant, MD, MPH, to the <a href="https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2111975_2111976_2112159,00.html" target="_blank">2012 TIME 100</a>, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people.</p>
Physical violence, sexual abuse and other forms of childhood and adult trauma are major factors fueling the epidemic of HIV/AIDS among American women, who account for at least 27 percent of new U.S. cases.
President Barack Obama appointed UCSF AIDS expert Grant Colfax, MD, as the director of the Office of National AIDS Policy.
A drug once taken by people with HIV/AIDS, but long ago shelved after newer, modern antiretroviral therapies became available, has now shed light on how the human body uses its natural immunity to fight the virus — work that could help uncover new targets for drugs.
<p>Paul Volberding, MD, one of the world's leading experts on treatment for patients infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, became the new director of the AIDS Research Institute (ARI) at UCSF on Feb. 13.</p>
Tenofovir, one of the most effective and commonly prescribed antiretroviral medications for HIV/AIDS, is associated with a significant risk of kidney damage and chronic kidney disease that increases over time, according to a study of more than 10,000 patients led by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and UCSF.
<p>Ellen Schell, RN, PhD, director of International Programs for the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance and an associate adjunct professor in the UCSF School of Nursing, reflects on the uphill battle to combat AIDS in Malawi, a tiny, impoverished country of 15 million.</p>
<p>The UCSF team came in third place overall in AIDS Walk San Francisco 2011 raising $55,000 in the annual event to benefit HIV/AIDS programs and services in the San Francisco Bay Area.</p>
<p>The UCSF team showed its spirit in the 25th Annual AIDS Walk San Francisco, which drew more than 25,000 walkers and raised more than $3 million to benefit HIV/AIDS programs and services in the Bay Area.</p>
<p>In advance of the upcoming AIDS Walk San Francisco, UCSF will host a free public screening of a documentary depicting the emergence of the epidemic at San Francisco General Hospital and a talk by UCSF's Jay Levy, co-discoverer of HIV as the cause of AIDS, on June 29.</p>
<p>For doctors confronting the AIDS epidemic, past ambitions always boiled down to two main goals: prevention, or finding ways to protect people not yet exposed to HIV, through vaccines, safe sex education or other means; and treatment, or discovering effective drugs and providing them to people with HIV/AIDS, helping them live longer.</p>
<p>Doctors and other health care professionals packed into San Francisco General Hospital’s Carr Auditorium for the June 7 medical grand rounds, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first AIDS report to the US Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention.</p>
<p>San Francisco General Hospital's internationally renowned Ward 86, one of the oldest and largest HIV/AIDS clinics in the United States, has from the start of the epidemic led efforts to understand HIV and develop treatments that make it possible for patients to manage the disease.</p>
<p>The first conference of its kind in Uganda drew together investigators from across all of sub-Saharan Africa to discuss leading-edge problems in the HIV/AIDS epidemic with the goal of fostering meaningful collaborations to combat the disease.</p>
<p>Preventing transmission to partners or children is key to this curbing the HIV/AIDS epidemic and researchers report t exciting new tools and tactics employed in the now 30-year war against the disease.</p>
<p>As one of the preeminent biomedical education and health sciences research institutions in the world, UCSF emerged early as a pioneer in the fight against AIDS. Today, three decades later, UCSF is working on multiple fronts to prevent, treat and stop the spread of the disease that has killed 33 million people worldwide.</p>
A joint project of UCSF and the Kenya Medical Research Institute has received $7 million—the first award of a five year grant that will total about $35 million—to expand its care and support of people affected by HIV/AIDS in Kenya.
HIV-infected patients who lost subcutaneous fat as a result of taking first-generation antiretroviral drugs still had strikingly less body fat than non-infected controls five years after switching to newer medications, according to a study led by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.
In April 2010, personnel aboard the International Space Station plan to carry out an experiment designed by a San Francisco VA Medical Center researcher that will investigate why the immune system’s T cells stop working in the absence of gravity. The experiment has implications for understanding the body’s ability to mount an immune response on earth, as well.
A new study co-authored by a UCSF resident physician and published this week examines why low-income countries are making poor progress in meeting international health goals. Study researcher Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD, of the Department of Medicine at UCSF and Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, said findings highlight the importance of looking at the entire health experience of a family, rather than just one or a few diseases.