In the good old days, nothing came between physicians and their patients. Today, however, telephone-based nurse counseling, a relatively unknown yet booming service, is being positioned as a major point-of-entry to the health care system, according to a report in the American Medical News.

How many women have made the dreaded trip to the drug store to purchase some personal product like tampons, birth control, a pregnancy test -- only to run into a friend, a co-worker or, worse, a drug store clerk who screams for a price check for the condoms the woman wants to buy? The fact that women's most private of products are sold in the most public of places seems strangely contradictory. Particularly strange when you consider that, very often, retail drug stores stock women's personal products behind the pharmacy counter -- forcing women to ask the pharmacist or clerk for them.

Life span is decreased without surgery for high-grade prostate cancer patients. Men aged 65-75, treated conservatively for low-grade localized prostate cancer, probably will not die any sooner than similar members of the general population; however, men diagnosed with high-grade tumors often have a 6-8 year loss of life expectancy when treated with conservative therapy, according to an article in a recent issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The incidence of condom breakage during vaginal intercourse has been estimated at around 1 percent, reports an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Those are low odds of a disaster, especially when you consider the alternative: no condom and unprotected sex. Still, if your partner happens to be infected with AIDS and the condom breaks, you could die. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, condom failures occur because they're not used correctly, not because of defects in manufacturing.

Pregnancy: Help Keep Teenage Pregnancy Rates Down by Making Responsible Choices With over one million American teenage girls becoming pregnant every year, the United States holds the title for having the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the industrialized world. To gain a clearer picture of this statistic, that breaks down to one out of five sexually active girls becoming pregnant. However, while those numbers are a bit overwhelming, pregnancy rates have been on the decline in the past few years. Helping Young Women Decide

Some Thoughts on World TB Day- March 24 A quiet shift took place a few years ago in the impact of global infectious diseases: The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic surpassed that of age-old tuberculosis (TB). In the past five years annual spending on HIV programmes increased 16-fold - from USD 500 million to around USD 8 billion per year. The same period saw a paltry 70% increase in funding for anti-TB efforts.

Kampala, Uganda. Rebecca has been living with AIDS since 1992. That was the year her husband died after many months of illness. He never told her what was wrong with him. But it was not until 2001 that Rebecca found she had the first symptoms of the disease. Since then, it has been one long uphill struggle to find money to pay for her medicines.

Although an optimum time to start antiretroviral therapy has not been established, the decision to treat is generally based on clinical symptoms and/or biological markers such as CD4 counts. The British HIV Association recommends that treatment should be initiated in patients before irreversible damage has been done to the immune system, i.e. CD4 counts above 350 cells/ml. Treatment should also be started in those with CD4 counts below 300 cells/mlwith or without viral loads greater than 10,000 to 50,000 HIV RNA copies/ml.

People in every country of the world are affected by AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). HIV/AIDS is becoming more of a global crisis every day. At present, 40 million adults and children are living with HIV/AIDS, and at least 10.4 million children currently under the age of 15 have lost their mother or both parents to AIDS.

A coalition of the richest philanthropic foundations in the United States pledged $100-million (U.S.) (in 2003), to cut mother-to-child transmission of HIV-AIDS in eight of the world's hardest-hit countries.

The number of children orphaned by HIV-AIDS is expected to double to 25 million by the year 2010, according to a new report from UNICEF. Carol Bellamy, executive director of United Nations Children's Fund, said that HIV-AIDS has created an "orphan crisis." In the third decade of the epidemic, AIDS has become a family disease, not one that affects just individuals. She said children growing up parentless in such huge numbers will create unprecedented social and economic problems.

There is still no cure for AIDS, nor is there a special diet for people infected with HIV, the human immune-deficiency virus that causes the disease. But good nutrition can help prevent or delay weight loss and other AIDS complications. Doctors often advise HIV-positive patients to consult a qualifed clinical dietitian, preferably while still healthy, to learn about sound nutrition. Asymptomatic HIV-infected individuals should follow the same dietary practices recommended for healthy people, but with added precautions.

HIV infection rates decreasing in several countries but global number of people living with HIV continues to rise. Increased HIV prevention and treatment efforts needed to slow and reverse AIDS epidemic, according to new UNAIDS/WHO report.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus, which like many other viruses stores its genetic information as RNA rather than as DNA. When the virus enters a targeted host cell, it releases its RNA and an enzyme (reverse transcriptase), and then makes DNA using the viral RNA as a pattern. The viral DNA is then incorporated into the host cell DNA. This reverses the pat-tern of human cells, which copy RNA from the pattern of human DNA (thus, the term "retro" for "backward"). Other RNA viruses, such as polio or measles, do not make DNA copies but simply copy their own RNA.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is an infection by one of two viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2. The HIV viruses progressively destroy some types of white blood cells called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are an important part of the body's immune defenses. When lymphocytes are destroyed, the body becomes susceptible to attack by many other infectious organisms. Many of the complications of HIV infection, including death, are usually the result of these other infections and not of the HIV infection itself.

More children die each year from pneumonia than from any other infectious disease - even more than from malaria or AIDS - according to the World Health Organization. And a majority of these deaths occur in developing countries. A bacterium, Streptococcus pneumoniae (also known as pneumococcus), is the leading cause of severe pneumonia in children. Currently the WHO estimates that pneumococcal disease are responsible for between 800,000 and 1 million child deaths each year.

Dentist are not using disposable syringe. It may can spread disease like AIDS. Several days ago I went to a dentist to pick up a tooth. Dentist pick up my tooth with the syringe which was used for the previous patient, he did not change it. So plastic made disposable syringe or disposable needle have to introduce ( Which are cheap in price.) in the market that dentist can use it.

Since 1996, the standard treatment for HIV infection has moved from single and double drug therapies to therapies containing three or more anti HIV drugs, also known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, or HAART. One of the main concerns of antiretroviral programs is to motivate clients to follow their complex drug regimen exactly as prescribed. Unless the therapy is adhered to at least 95 percent correctly, levels of HIV in the blood will rise, resulting in AIDS related complications.

It is amazing, and humbling, to realize that in the late 1970s the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) was spreading silently- unrecognized and unnoticed around the world. In the summer of S981, when AIDS was first recognized by the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States among five homosexual men in Los Angeles. Presently, HIV/ATDS is the greatest health crisis ever faced by the mankind. Already this pandemic has killed about 30 million people. More than 40 million are living with virus. An additional 14,000 are added everyday to this pool.

Good counseling for people infected with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) helps them comply with treatment, understand their contraceptive choices and encourages them to notify partners. Infected individuals who continue to be sexually active, particularly those who are HIV-positive, need to understand ways to prevent transmission to others and may need effective contraception to prevent unintended pregnancy.