BUZZ
A “CURE” FOR HIV?
It’s HIV Prevention Party Time Healthy Love Workshops make some noise.
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group of giggling girlfriends call each other by their “sexy names,” chat about oral sex and fiercely compete to be the first to put a condom on a penis model correctly. Despite the fun and games, this isn’t a bridal shower or sorority tea. It’s a Healthy Love Workshop (HLW), an HIV intervention geared toward African-American women. “We work with groups of women who already know each other to build a certain comfort level,” says Dázon Dixon Diallo, founder of SisterLove Inc., the Atlanta community-based organization that has been developing these parties since the group’s birth in 1989. Recently, SisterLove and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put Healthy Love to the test in a study. They found that, three months after attending a one-time, three- to four-hour HLW session, women reported higher rates of condom use and HIV testing than their peers who attended the more traditional, less interactive “HIV 101” workshop. The study suggests that HLW works because the parties build on the support of a friendship group to encourage positive attitudes and proper condom use. Instead of asking women to come to a workshop, SisterLove goes to wherever the women normally meet—including sororities and private homes. The CDC is convening HLW parties in other cities. If outcomes match those from Atlanta, the CDC could approve HLW as an evidence-based prevention technique. The parties, says Mehret Mandefro, MD, a physician and HIV prevention researcher, “show HIV prevention doesn’t have to be complicated. A one-off intervention is practical because it fits in people’s lives.” Still, Mandefro emphasizes that we won’t make a real dent in HIV prevention for women without addressing domestic violence and abuse head on. One in four women have experienced such violence, curtailing their ability to demand safer sex. To definitively stop HIV’s spread among women, she says, “we need a real movement to address violence.” —Diana Scholl
More than
4 in 10: 1 2 RE A L H E A LTH S U MMER 2011
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When doctors eradicated HIV in an American man in Berlin, news outlets declared, “A cure for HIV!” But does a cure for one man mean there’s now a remedy for all? Not quite. The man, Timothy Ray Brown, had recurrent leukemia in 2007. Treatment for this type of cancer involves wiping out the patient’s entire immune system with chemotherapy and then supplying a new system through a bone marrow (a.k.a. stem cell) transplant. So Brown’s docs at the University Medicine Berlin cleverly found a donor who had a particular genetic quirk that makes the body resist HIV. The result? In December 2010, Brown’s medical team said evidence “strongly suggests” he has been cured of the virus. Nobel Prize–winner David Baltimore, PhD, who researches genetic therapies for HIV at the California Institute of Technology, said that unfortunately this case is “very difficult to duplicate—virtually impossible on a large scale,” because such transplants are very dangerous and expensive and the chance of finding the proper bone marrow donor so rare. But, Baltimore says, the news that HIV can be cured is “extremely encouraging. I see many people trying very hard to develop safe and effective genetic therapies for HIV that can be used on a wide scale.” With Brown’s cure as a starting point, we just might get there. —Benjamin Ryan
Number of African Americans unaware that meds can keep an HIV-positive mom from transmitting the virus to her newborn. Source: The Kaiser Family Foundation, 2009
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