“It is imperative that we … work to rebuild, innovate, and expand (STD) prevention in the U.S.,” said Dr. Leandro Mena of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a speech Monday at a medical conference on sexually transmitted diseases.

Infections rates for some STDs, including gonorrhea and syphilis, have been rising for years. Last year the rate of syphilis cases reached its highest since 1991 and the total number of cases hit its highest since 1948. HIV cases are also on the rise, up 16% last year.

And an international outbreak of monkeypox, which is being spread mainly between men who have sex with other men, has further highlighted the nation’s worsening problem with diseases spread mostly through sex.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://apnews.com/article/monkeypox-science-health-covid-epidemics-aaac64591251293f45c225d3fe963d0c

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The post ‘Out of control’ STD situation prompts call for changes first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is one of the world’s most serious public health challenges. But there is a global commitment to stopping new HIV infections and ensuring that everyone with HIV has access to HIV treatment.

According to UNAIDS :

Number of People with HIV—There were approximately 37.9 million people across the globe with HIV/AIDS in 2018. Of these, 36.2 million were adults and 1.7 million were children (<15 years old).

New HIV Infections—An estimated 1.7 million individuals worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2018. (New HIV infections, or “HIV incidence,” refers to the estimated number of people who newly acquired the HIV virus during a year, which is different from the number of people diagnosed with HIV during a year. Some people may have HIV but not know it.) Of these new infections:

• 1.6 million infections were among people ages 15 and older
• 160,000 infections were among children ages 0-14

HIV Testing—Approximately 79% of people with HIV globally knew their HIV status in 2018. The remaining 21% (about 8.1 million people) still need access to HIV testing services. HIV testing is an essential gateway to HIV prevention, treatment, care, and support services.

HIV Treatment Access—In 2018, 23.3 million people with HIV (62%) were accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) globally, an increase of 1.6 million since 2017, and up from 8 million in 2010. HIV treatment access is key to the global effort to end AIDS as a public health threat. People with HIV who are aware of their status, take ART daily as prescribed, and get and keep an undetectable viral load can live long, healthy lives and have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting HIV to their HIV-negative partners.

HIV Care Continuum—The term HIV care continuum refers to the sequence of steps a person with HIV takes from diagnosis through receiving treatment until his or her viral load is suppressed to undetectable levels. Each step in the continuum is marked by an assessment of the number of people who have reached that stage. The stages are: being diagnosed with HIV; being linked to medical care; starting ART; adhering to the treatment regimen; and, finally, having HIV suppressed to undetectable levels in the blood. UNAIDS’s 90-90-90 goals set as targets that by 2020, 90% of all people with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of all people who know their status will be on ART, and 90% of all people receiving ART will have viral suppression. Tracking progress toward those goals, UNAIDS reports that in 2018, of all people with HIV worldwide:

• 79% knew their HIV status
• 78% of all people who knew their status were accessing ART
• 86% of all people receiving ART had viral suppression

Mother-to-Child Transmission—In 2018, 92% of pregnant women with HIV received ART to prevent transmitting HIV to their babies during pregnancy and childbirth and to protect their own health. This is compared to 49% in 2010.

AIDS-related Deaths—AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by more than 55% since its peak in 2004. In 2018, around 770,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.2 million in 2010 and 1.7 million in 2004.

Regional Impact—The vast majority of people with HIV are in low- and middle-income countries. In 2018, there were 20.6 million people with HIV (57%) in eastern and southern Africa, 5.0 million (13%) in western and central Africa, 5.9 million (16%) in Asia and the Pacific, and 2.2 million (6%) in Western and Central Europe and North America.

Challenges and Progress

Despite advances in our scientific understanding of HIV and its prevention and treatment as well as years of significant effort by the global health community and leading government and civil society organizations, too many people with HIV or at risk for HIV still do not have access to prevention, care, and treatment, and there is still no cure. Further, the HIV epidemic not only affects the health of individuals, but it also impacts households, communities, and the development and economic growth of nations. Many of the countries hardest hit by HIV also suffer from other infectious diseases, food insecurity, and other serious problems.

Despite these challenges, there have been successes and promising signs. New global efforts have been mounted to address the epidemic, particularly in the last decade. The number of people newly infected with HIV has declined over the years. In addition, the number of people with HIV receiving treatment in resource-poor countries has dramatically increased in the past decade and dramatic progress has been made in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV and keeping mothers alive.

However, despite the availability of a widening array of effective HIV prevention tools and methods and a massive scale-up of HIV treatment in recent years, UNAIDS cautions that the pace of progress in reducing new HIV infections, increasing access to treatment, and ending AIDS-related deaths is slowing down, with some countries making impressive gains while others are experiencing rises in new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths.

U.S. Response to the Global Epidemic

The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the U.S. Government’s response to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and represents the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history. Through PEPFAR, the U.S. has supported a world safer and more secure from infectious disease threats. It has demonstrably strengthened the global capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to new and existing risks—which ultimately enhances global health security and protects America’s borders.

In addition, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) represents the largest public investment in HIV/AIDS research in the world. NIH is engaged in research around the globe to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent HIV infection and its many associated conditions, and to find a cure.

Read more about the U.S. Government’s global HIV/AIDS activities.

Source: https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/global-statistics

The post The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic – 770,000 AIDS deaths in 2018 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

But you don’t want to be out in that rain, which is where the Tijuana caravan migrants are, just south of San Diego, soaking up rain, mud, germs, cold, bacteria, viruses – and picking up diseases.

Right now, it’s happening in Tijuana, where 6,000 migrants are still camped out.  Fox News reports that more than a third, some 2,200 of them are being treated for lice, scabies, chicken pox, hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis, and infections.  The San Diego television press reported last night that measles has also been detected in the squalid encampment, where new caravans are arriving even as some pack up and go home.

So much for the insistence from the left that the migrants are disease-free, and any concern about public health issues is easily explained as xenophobia, as Vox claimed.  Boston Public Radio WGBH echo-chambered that in the true JournoList tradition of Vox founder Ezra Klein (it’s as though they talk to each other, no?) seizing on the small discrepancy in a U.S. agent’s claim about “smallpox” when he likely meant “chicken pox” – which sure enough, has turned up among the migrants.

Such a phony, phony argument.  With the latest Fox News report, these media claims did not age well.

Nobody should be camping out in unsanitary conditions in that rain.  What a vile group the caravan organizers are to allow such inhuman conditions to occur.  Any public health official anywhere in the world could tell you that any time you move large groups of people without sanitation, housing, or basic necessities, you are going to get diseases spreading throughout that population.  For the organizers, with their rabidly leftist desire to charge the border and break it down as new Che Guevaras, casualties are a mere detail.  What’s mass casualties compared to the glory of challenging Donald Trump at the gates to the American empire?

And as the left continues to press Trump to allow the migrants in, the reality remains that to allow foreign nationals into the U.S. bearing chicken pox, hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, infections, scabies, lice – and the whole plethora of new ailments that is sure to come of the plague of rain on Tijuana – is absolutely irresponsible, a recipe for spreading disease into the U.S. citizen population.  In times past, Ellis Island screened out arriving immigrants for any sign of disease.  Today, illegal immigration dispenses with that nicety, and all comers enter.  Open borders means open disease, and for everyone.  Mass illegal migration has since coincided with an amazing collection of new disease outbreaks now being seen in California, the nation’s pestilence capital, and the home of a quarter of the nation’s illegals.  San Diego got a hepatitis outbreak.  Los Angeles has typhus.  Now there’s a polio-like disease that Dr. Brian Joondeph raised questions about.  Uncontrolled borders also correspond to the appearance of heretofore unknown diseases in the Los Angeles area, such as leprosy and chagas disease, the latter of which up until now had been primarily seen in Central America.  What a coincidence.

The rains are coming down hard now, and one can only pity the migrants who were such putty in the hands of these leftist organizers, and more are arriving.  A third of them have got diseases now in their squalid camps, and with the rains pouring, that figure is going to grow exponentially.

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/lice_hepatitus_tb_chicken_pox_scabies_plague_a_third_of_the_caravan_migrants__with_rains_just_getting_started.html

The post Lice, hepatitis, TB, chicken pox, scabies plague a third of the caravan migrants – and now there’s rain first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.