TheBody.com: Podcast Central

Since graduating college in the late '80s, Monique Howard has been working in the HIV/AIDS field. From examining specimens in a lab to implementing HIV risk reduction programming at Beth Israel Hospital to earning a graduate degree in human sexuality, her work has been grounded in understanding how HIV/AIDS impacts women. Now, Howard is the executive director of the New Jersey Women and AIDS Network (NJWAN) in New Brunswick, N.J. She talks with us about her work with NJWAN and the needs of women in the state of New Jersey and across the country.

For the past 20-plus years, Gary Paul Wright has dedicated his life to fighting the AIDS epidemic in New York City. Wright, one of the founders of the House of Latex, worked for Gay Men's Health Crisis and New York City's Department of Education before starting his own organization, the African American Office of Gay Concerns (AAOGC), in Newark, N.J. Wright talks with us about AAOGC, its Status Is Everything HIV prevention campaign and the needs of LGBT African Americans and Latinos in Newark.

Debbie Hagins, M.D., is a very busy woman: Her HIV/AIDS clinic serves nearly 1,000 people in Georgia. But that doesn't stop her from giving her cell phone number to her patients, and even going to their houses to make sure they take their HIV medications. Because many of her patients are struggling financially, this kind of dedication can make a huge difference.

When most people think of the island of Jamaica, they likely think of white-sand beaches, sunny skies and lilting accents. But as poet Kwame Dawes and MAC AIDS Fund Director Nancy Mahon explain in our latest edition of HIV Frontlines, Jamaica has deep underlying problems -- and HIV/AIDS is one of them.

In New York, a new resource may help put an end to the confusion among emergency and general health care providers regarding HIV post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) administration. The resource is a recently developed "widget" -- an easy-to-use, computer-based tool -- that advises health professionals on best practices for giving PEP. In this interview, Antonio Urbina, M.D., of St. Vincent's Medical Center describes the widget's functions while detailing the fine points of PEP.

Looking for an expert summary of the latest revisions to the official U.S. HIV treatment guidelines? Check out this exclusive interview with David Wohl, M.D., a prominent HIV physician/researcher and a member of the expert panel responsible for revising the guidelines. In this concise summary with TheBody.com's editorial director, Dr. Wohl walks us through the updated guidelines and explains the importance of the new revisions.

Until the mid-1990s in the U.S., packing on a few extra pounds seemed like a good thing: It helped protect a person against the dangers of wasting and HIV's destructive effects on the immune system. But today, for people on potent HIV treatment, those extra pounds may no longer help -- in fact, they may reduce the immune benefits of HIV meds, a new study suggests.

Abbott Laboratories: F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd.: D. Boehringer Ingelheim: D+. If the nine major HIV drug companies were in school, most would probably be in detention, according to a new "report card" issued by the AIDS Treatment Activists Coalition (ATAC). ATAC graded the drug companies in five different categories, including fair pricing and their relationship with the HIV community. Some did alright -- Merck & Co. and Tibotec Therapeutics both got B's -- but most didn't fare as well. In this one-on-one interview, we get the nitty-gritty on this telling report from longtime HIV/AIDS journalist and activist Bob Huff, a member of ATAC's board of directors.

"Yes, babies are pretty, but they grow up to have sex ... and to potentially expose themselves to HIV," says HIV advocate Kai Chandler. Part of Chandler's work at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia involves getting preteens and teens tested for HIV, as well as talking to them about some pretty heavy issues -- sexual risk, partner negotiation and healthy relationships -- while they're still young enough for prevention messages to have the greatest impact. In this interview, Chandler explains how this job gets done -- and what else is going on in Philadelphia, a vibrant center of HIV/AIDS activism.

We had a short break from the panic over swine flu (H1N1). But as this year's flu season approaches in the U.S. and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, fear appears to be ramping up again. Even many experts are wondering just how bad this winter will be. Have we learned anything new about swine flu since the global outbreak began in April, about what lies in store over the months to come, and about what people with HIV can do to protect themselves? We caught up with top HIV physician Joel Gallant, M.D., M.P.H., for the latest news and predictions.

"I have to have an army of people helping me educate," says Vanessa Austin, HIV services outreach coordinator at Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. For Austin, the key to reaching the most people with her HIV advocacy work is training people to become "information warriors" who then spread messages about HIV prevention and testing to their peers. "We have to let them pass the information the way they're passing this virus," she says. Austin gives an exciting snapshot of her vital work in this interview with TheBody.com.

As a swine flu virus appears to make its way across the world, so has misinformation and confusion about what the virus is and what sort of threat it poses, particularly for people with weakened immune systems or some people living with HIV. To help us fill in that knowledge gap, we've asked Dr. Joel Gallant for some insights. Dr. Gallant is a professor of medicine and epidemiology in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and he happens to be one of the leading HIV specialists in the United States.

When we finally turn the tide against HIV among African Americans, it'll be thanks to people like Audria Russell. She's the HIV program coordinator at the nonprofit organization Women in Need in New York City. She's in charge of a support group that educates and empowers girls between the ages of 10 and 13.

On Nov. 3, 2008, the U.S. government updated its Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in HIV-1-Infected Adults and Adolescents. These guidelines were last updated on Jan. 29, 2008. We asked Joel Gallant, M.D., M.P.H., to provide a summary of the changes. Dr. Gallant is not only one of the top clinicians and researchers in the United States, he's also a guidelines panel member.

Joel Gallant, M.D., M.P.H., is not only a widely respected HIV clinician and researcher: He's also an online HIV expert, spending some of his free time answering questions about the virus. He's been doing this since the early days of the Internet. He's so good at it that he's just had a book published that pools together some of the most important questions he commonly answers. Called "100 Questions and Answers About HIV and AIDS," it's geared mainly for people with HIV who want to learn more, and Dr. Gallant is here to talk to us about it.

TheBody.com interviewed Dr. Cal Cohen, one of the lead researchers who investigated TMC114 (darunavir, Prezista) in clinical trials, to get his take on some of the key questions surrounding this new HIV medication: Why should we be so excited about TMC114? What side effects can it cause? How is it likely to change the way HIVers with multidrug resistance are treated?

"It was a very eerie, depressing, anxiety-provoking period," recalls Anthony Fauci, M.D. "The very darkest years of my professional career." Dr. Fauci is recounting the early 1980s, when, as an infectious disease doc working for the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Maryland, he watched helplessly as people showed up at his hospital with a mysterious -- and almost always fatal -- illness. That illness, of course, was AIDS. From the very beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci has played a critical role in helping doctors and researchers better understand HIV disease. In the latest edition of our HIV Frontlines podcast series, Dr. Fauci looks back over more than 25 years spent fighting HIV.

Tony Miles, Ph.D., is a psychologist and long-time HIV educator. Since 2000, he has been building an extraordinary digital library of first-person stories from people living with HIV. The collection, called The Positive Project, now includes interviews with more than 100 HIV-positive people from all walks of life. The interviews cover a wide range of topics, including stigma, coping with an HIV diagnosis, taking medications and dating. These clips have been used throughout the United States as invaluable resources for HIV education and awareness. In this interview, with talk with Dr. Miles about the project.

When Mark King was 20, he moved to West Hollywood. It was the early 1980s, and King was set on pursuing his acting career and soaking up the gay scene. He never expected to find himself in the middle of the darkest time in the U.S. HIV epidemic, caring for close friends as they became sick and died, while struggling with his own diagnosis. In this powerful, emotional interview with The Body, King recounts the tremendous courage of people who fought through the epidemic in those early years.

When Gil Robertson's brother Jeffrey tested positive in 1982, their family defied the norms of the time and immediately surrounded Jeffrey with love and support. Inspired by his family's experience, Robertson began gathering stories from dozens of African Americans about how HIV had altered their lives. The result is Not in My Family: AIDS in the African-American Community. In this interview with TheBody.com, Robertson discusses the anthology, which contains essays by leaders such as the Reverend Al Sharpton and entertainers like Mo'Nique, as well as activists, artists, and HIV-positive people and their relatives.

The past year has brought so many new drug approvals that even some HIV experts are scratching their heads as they try to figure out how all of these meds work and how they can best be used to treat people with HIV. Today, we're going to look at one of the new classes, or types, of HIV medications. Called CCR5 inhibitors, this drug class attacks HIV in a totally new way. Helping us to understand this new drug class will be Dr. David Hardy, a researcher and clinician who is the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is also one of the leading researchers looking at Selzentry (maraviroc, Celsentri), the first CCR5 inhibitor to be approved in the United States. He'll give us the lowdown on how this new drug class works and put it into context.

On Jan. 29, 2008, the U.S. government released the second part of its new HIV treatment guidelines. This second section contains antiretroviral recommendations. We asked Joel Gallant, M.D., M.P.H., to provide a summary of the changes. Dr. Gallant is not only one of the top clinicians and researchers in the United States, he's also a guidelines panel member.

In 2004, a single e-mail changed the course of Dr. Kathryn Anastos' life -- and in so doing, may have helped saved the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of women and children in Rwanda. The e-mail came from a Rwandan activist group for women and children who were victims of the genocidal civil war that tore the country apart in 1994. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped during the genocide, and as Dr. Anastos recalls, the activist group "had just learned that the *perpetrators* of their rapes ... were being treated -- with state of the art, triple antiretroviral therapy." Outraged, Dr. Anastos and two other women from the United States decided to make a difference: They founded clinics in Rwanda that, with help from the Rwandan government and local staff, provide treatment and care to Rwandan women and their children. In this one-on-one interview, Dr. Anastos tells her story.

On Jan. 18, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first new non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor in nearly a decade. It was known throughout much of its development as TMC125, and is now known by its generic name, etravirine, and the brand name of Intelence. Etravirine's approval follows on the heels of the approvals of four other new antiretrovirals, making this an unprecedented time in the history of HIV/AIDS medicine. To learn more about etravirine, and its potential impact on the treatment of HIV-infected patients, we spoke with Dr. Cal Cohen, research director of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and Community Research Initiative of New England in Boston, Mass. He is also a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cohen has participated in research on etravirine, and has also received funding from Tibotec, which developed etravirine.

On Dec. 1, 2007, the U.S. government released the first, and the biggest, part of its new HIV treatment guidelines. We asked Joel Gallant, M.D., M.P.H., to provide a summary of the changes. Dr. Gallant is not only one of the top clinicians and researchers in the United States, he's also a guidelines panel member.

You're in a porn shop -- but you're not there to buy Blazing Saddles: Hardcore Version. You're there to meet up with a man you don't even know, and the two of you plan to have sex like bunnies back where nobody can see. Except there's someone who knows what you're up to! A man passes by, hands you some condoms, and teaches you about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Brian Datcher is that man: An HIV educator who is HIV-positive himself, Datcher's job is one that few people even know exists, but it's a critical part of efforts to stop the spread of HIV in the United States. Read or listen to this eye-opening interview with Datcher in TheBody.com's newest podcast series, HIV Frontlines -- U.S. Edition.

Dr. David Wohl briefly describes how Isentress differs from other meds. This is Part II of an update on Isentress.

On Oct. 12, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Isentress, the first member of a new class of meds called integrase inhibitors. Isentress is also known generically as raltegravir, and during its early development was called MK-0518. To find out more about Isentress and how it might impact treatment for HIV-positive people, we spoke with Dr. David Wohl, an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the co-director of HIV services for the North Carolina Department of Corrections. Dr. Wohl has participated in research on Isentress, and has also received research funding from Merck and Company, which developed Isentress. This is Part I of an update on Isentress.

It's been a year since the United States approved a new HIV medication, and four long years since we witnessed the birth of a whole new class of meds. But on Aug. 6, 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to maraviroc, which will be known by the brand name Selzentry. Maraviroc is the first in a new class of HIV meds known as CCR5 inhibitors. Which HIV-positive people stand to benefit the most from maraviroc? How can you know if maraviroc's a good fit for you? To get the answers to these questions, we spoke with Dr. Joel Gallant, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and one of the leading HIV specialists in the United States.

HIV clinician and researcher Benjamin Young, M.D., Ph.D., recently returned from St. Petersburg, Russia, where he has been helping train health care providers. In this interview, Dr. Young explains the trials and tribulations that come with trying to help ramp up HIV care in a city where HIV is rapidly spreading and the health care system is struggling to keep pace. He also discusses about the impact of his work abroad on his own clinical practice in Denver, and discusses the challenges an English-speaking physician faces when he tries to train health workers who speak a language in which he hasn't the slightest idea how to communicate. Dr. Young, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a consultant physician for Denver ID Consultants at Rose Medical Center in Denver, Colo., is actively involved in educating health care professionals and community groups throughout the world on HIV-related subjects. He has devoted the past two years to training HIV physicians in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Dr. Constantinides is the director of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at New York University School of Medicine. He's been doing reconstructive surgery on people with facial lipoatrophy since 1998. He talks to us today about lipoatrophy's causes and treatments.

As an HIV health care provider and a person living with the virus, Dr. Frascino has a unique perspective. As someone who has struggled with lipoatrophy himself, he knows all too well what his patients are experiencing. Today, he talks to us about lipoatrophy's causes and treatments.

Dr. Mulligan helped organize the first International Workshop on Adverse Drug Reactions and Lipodystrophy in HIV, the only medical conference focused entirely on body-shape changes in people with HIV. She is one of the key researchers working on trying to understand and treat the disorder. She talks to us today about lipoatrophy's causes and treatments.

Dr. Young has been caring for people with HIV since 1994. Since that time, he's earned a reputation as an outspoken patient advocate, a personable clinician and a dedicated researcher. He talks to us today about lipoatrophy's causes and treatments.