Welcome to the 75th issue of HIV This Week

Welcome to the 75th issue of HIV This Week ! In this issue we cover blood safety (how far away are we from the goal of quality assured HIV screening of every unit of blood?), national responses - injecting drug use (urgent need for scaled-up harm reduction in South-East Asian countries – everyone knows what needs doing so where is the pragmatic leadership?), gender and access to treatment (how concepts of masculinity trap men and prevent them from accessing treatment and why women can access care much more readily in Burkina Faso), male circumcision (foreskin surface area (size) really does matter!; does circumcision protect primarily insertive Australian men who have sex with men?), monitoring and evaluation (What’s in place now to track our progress to reaching Millennium Development Goal 6 to halt and reverse the HIV epidemic in 2015?), stigma (“Just like fever” and other evidence of antiretroviral treatment-induced normalisation of HIV versus stigma in rural Tanzania), microbicides (CCR5 inhibitor Maraviroc concentrates right where we need it in cervicovaginal fluid and vaginal tissue; intravaginal rings deliver the NNRTI dapivirine throughout the lower female genital tract for a month – time to take this promising prevention modality for women through to trials!), policy and economics (in the lead up to Copenhagen, lessons from climate change research suggest that HIV research should be more proactive and forward-looking; f inancing the HIV response to 2031: hard choices), diagnosis and monitoring (dried blood spots for early infant diagnosis and viral load monitoring can make all the difference in remote healthcare settings; saving money with pooled viral load testing to pick up treatment failure), vaccines (repeated low dose mucosal SHIV challenge reveals effective, low-titre antibody protection in macaques – time to recreate human HIV sexual exposure levels in monkeys rather than blasting away with super challenges; why you might eventually consider a nasal vaccination), basic science (what happens to B cells, the ones that make antibodies, in acute HIV infection?), sexual transmission (why acyclovir should be included in syndromic management for genital ulcers in men living with HIV), tuberculosis (let’s get on with isoniazid preventive therapy for people living with HIV with close monitoring and operational research to improve implementation).