PLoS Medicine World AIDS Day Issue

In recognition of World AIDS Day (December 1, 2007) this week's issue of PLoS Medicine includes several noteworthy papers on HIV diagnosis, prevention and treatment, including research articles, commentaries and an editorial titled "HIV Treatment Proceeds as Prevention Research Confounds." Among the articles in this issue: 

• A systematic review (Beyrer et al.) concludes that men who have sex with men in Asia, Africa, the Americas and the former Soviet Union have a markedly greater risk of being HIV-infected than does the general population

• A study conducted in Côte d'Ivoire (Desgrées-du-Loû et al.) identifies three key junctures at which women in a mother-to-child HIV prevention program disclose their HIV status to their partners
• A mutation in a little-studied structural region of the AIDS virus can cause resistance to several HIV drugs (Tachedjian et al.), with possible implications for clinical resistance testing
• A test commonly used to confirm HIV infection can also be used to calculate how many recent infections have occurred in a population (Schüpbach et al.)

• In the magazine section, cytomegalovirus retinitis is described as the neglected disease of the HIV epidemic (Heiden et al.)

• A workshop report discusses humoral immune responses to HIV and approaches to designing vaccines. (Montefiori et al.)

 We will be publishing further research and commentary on HIV/AIDS in the coming weeks. Please check this blog or the PLoS Medicine home page.  We invite you to use this blog to comment on any of these articles, or you can send us an e-letter by using the link from the appropriate article.