Blogs / Reality Base

Things are looking up for STDs these days. On the side of the newly-revitalized Christian right, you have abstinence doctrines strangling sex education and disease prevention efforts in schools (and celebrating the teen pregnancies that result). On the left, you have the “demystification” of non-lethal diseases like chlamydia, gonorrhea and HPV, sending the message that unprotected sex (and the infections that result) are “really no big deal.” Mix them together, and you’ve got a spike in U.S. infection rates, after years on the decline.

Granted, given that diseases like chlamydia and gonorrhea can be cured with antibiotics, and non-curables like herpes controlled with medication, it’s worth asking: Why are non-lethal STDs so dangerous?

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There’s lots of buzz in the world of AIDS research this week, with the XVII International Conference on AIDS getting ready to kick off in Mexico City. Robert Siliciano, an HIV expert at Johns Hopkins, has found that current antiretroviral drugs have stopped HIV from replicating, the first of three steps needed to cure the virus. Some drug combinations have even squashed the viral cells’ ability to copy themselves to less than one time in a billion. So if the virus can’t spread, what’s left to cure? According to Siliciano’s prior research, HIV hides in reservoirs throughout the body, where it can live without replicating. Curing HIV means finding all of those reservoirs, and then finding a way to eliminate them.

Anti-transmission technologies are also seeing some success in the lab. At St. George’s University of London, a team of researchers led by Martin Cranage has been testing a rectal gel on macaques infected with SIV (the monkey version of the AIDS virus). They found that the gel, which contains the HIV drug tenofovir, partially or totally protected most of the uninfected monkeys from transmission.

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