Scientists believe they may have discovered an unlikely weapon in the fight against the global HIV/AIDS epidemic: bee venom.

According to researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, bee venom contains a powerful toxin called “melittin” that can effectively kill the HIV virus while leaving the surrounding cells unharmed. Now that they’ve isolated the toxin, they’re using it to develop a vaginal gel to prevent the spread of HIV — a new tool that will hopefully help stop the transmission of the virus in places with high rates of infection:

“Our hope is that in places where HIV is running rampant, people could use this gel as a preventive measure to stop the initial infection,” says Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD, a research instructor in medicine. [...]

According to Hood, an advantage of this approach is that the nanoparticle attacks an essential part of the virus’ structure. In contrast, most anti-HIV drugs inhibit the virus’s ability to replicate. But this anti-replication strategy does nothing to stop initial infection, and some strains of the virus have found ways around these drugs and reproduce anyway.

“We are attacking an inherent physical property of HIV,” Hood says. “Theoretically, there isn’t any way for the virus to adapt to that. The virus has to have a protective coat, a double-layered membrane that covers the virus.”

Beyond prevention in the form of a vaginal gel, Hood also sees potential for using nanoparticles with melittin as therapy for existing HIV infections, especially those that are drug-resistant. The nanoparticles could be injected intravenously and, in theory, would be able to clear HIV from the blood stream.

Researchers haven’t yet explored all of melittin’s potential to be used for contraceptive purposes, but Hood pointed out that the gel could likely be adapted to target sperm as well as HIV — essentially creating a spermicide that could protect against both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. But as of now, the gel is safe for both sperm and vaginal cells, and may be particularly useful for HIV-positive individuals who want to safely conceive.

And, since melittin could also help combat viruses other than HIV, bee venom could have broader implications for public health efforts. Melittin may be able to similarly destroy the hepatitis B and C viruses.

Bee venom’s important toxin is just the latest unexpected breakthrough in HIV treatment and prevention efforts. Last week, scientists reported that they may have “functionally cured” a two-year-old child of her HIV infection by aggressively treating her infection from the time of her birth. Unfortunately, the automatic cuts that recently began taking effect as a result of the sequestration may hamper future HIV research, as scientists will now have fewer resources to invest in research projects focused on unlocking the keys to treating the epidemic.

A months-long investigation by the American Independent has uncovered that the Michigan Department of Community Health has been secretly collecting detailed demographic information for the people who take HIV tests at community clinics — a practice that has been going on for more than a decade, despite the fact that it raises serious privacy concerns about the way the state is handling sensitive health care information.

When Michigan residents get tested for HIV at a federally-funded community clinic, their information — including age, birth date, and potential “risk categories” for contracting the virus — is entered into a massive state database that stores it indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the test. The state-owned data could even include the identities of people who have sexual relationships with HIV-positive individuals. There’s no way for a Michigander to remove their information from the system once it has been entered.

The Department of Community Health says they simply want to track the number of tests conducted with federal grant money, and state officials claim that the database “does not contain personally identifiable information.” But outside investigations have found that there’s not enough security to safeguard the sensitive information, and anyone who works for the health department is able to access it. In fact, some of Michigan’s local health departments are using the database’s information to build criminal cases against HIV-positive individuals who they want to prosecute for failing to disclose their status — something that represents a potential breach of civil liberties:

“There are certainly privacy rights involved, particularly when clients are not being told that the information they are providing is being put in a database which can be utilized to assist with criminal prosecution of people living with HIV,” said Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan LGBT Project. “It’s ironic that in its effort to try to prevent transmission of HIV as part of the HIV-testing process, this policy and practice will likely discourage people from being tested, because they fear criminal prosecution for having knowledge of their HIV status.”

Rose Saxe, from the National ACLU AIDS Project, also weighed in on the issue. She said the state is collecting confidential health information, but also “deeply personal information.”

“The state has a constitutional obligation to keep this information secure, and to protect the privacy rights of people testing for HIV,” Saxe told TAI in an email. “Because of the sensitivity of this information, the ACLU believes it is critically important that the state have in place policies to ensure that this information is used appropriately. This includes safeguards to prevent inadvertent disclosure, and ways to ensure that it is only accessed for legitimate reasons by health department employees. If the state cannot or does not undertake steps to protect this deeply private information about people in Michigan, it has no business collecting and storing it indefinitely.”

Several studies have demonstrated that criminalizing HIV is not an effective policy to combat rates of infection. In fact, just as the ACLU’s Jay Kaplan points out, those type of punitive laws can actually dissuade people from learning their status because they’re worried about facing legal action. They also serve to reinforce the lingering stigma associated with the virus. Nevertheless, 34 states — including Michigan — have adopted criminal laws based on perceived exposure to HIV.

The Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) has called for the repeal of criminalization laws across the country. Even if Michigan doesn’t throw out its HIV-specific criminal laws, it could take immediate steps to stop secretly collecting data to enforce those laws without its residents’ knowledge.

The scientific community is buzzing with the news that doctors may have cured a two-year-old girl of her HIV infection, marking the first time the virus has been eliminated from a child’s system. But thanks to sequestration, scientists may struggle to build upon that potentially groundbreaking study — since the automatic budget cuts that began going into effect at the beginning of the month will undermine this exact type of innovative medical research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which co-funded the forthcoming study about the two-year-old’s case, is facing an 8.2 percent across-the-board cut as a result of sequestration. That will slash NIH’s $31 billion budget by about $1.6 billion — leaving considerably less funding for new biomedical research projects:

The NIH, in conjunction with the Foundation for AIDS Research, also known as amfAR, paid for the research of the child who was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Chris Collins, vice president of public policy for amfAR, said there was a “cruel irony” to the timing of the HIV cure discovery and sequestration.

“As we’ve heard this exciting news about cure research, the entire AIDS research field is experiencing a significant cutback,” said Collins. “If we were in the business of ending AIDS, this would be the time to invest, not pull our resources out.”

A former NIH director has already warned that the sequester cuts could set back medical science for a generation. Existing research will have to be scaled back, and significant cuts to grants could dissuade scientists from getting new projects off the ground.

And that’s not the only way that sequestration could potentially set back progress in combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Accpording to the Department of Health and Human Services, budget cuts will result in 424,000 fewer HIV tests conducted by state agencies, as well as an estimated 7,400 fewer patients able to access to their HIV medications through government assistance programs.

On Sunday, doctors announced they have apparently cured a two-and-a-half child of an HIV infection, marking the first time that medical professionals have successfully eliminated the virus in a child’s system.

The baby was born in rural Mississippi to an HIV-positive mother who was unaware she had the virus. Within the first 30 hours of her life, doctors began treating the child for the virus without waiting for the test results to confirm that the baby girl was HIV-positive. The doctors believe that their early intervention — as well as their decision to use an aggressive three-drug treatment, rather than the two-drug regimen typically used to treat babies — contributed to the fact that the child tested negative for HIV after about a year and a half. The baby hasn’t required HIV drugs for the past year, and doctors believe she is “functionally cured.”

The report has yet to be confirmed, and outside experts are waiting for the researchers to publish their full findings to verify all of the details. Scientists caution that the young girl’s story is unique, and her cure won’t immediately signal a cure for the 34 million people living with HIV worldwide. The type of treatment that eliminated the virus in this child may not actually be relevant for HIV-positive adults — especially since largely successful drug therapies already help prevent mothers from passing the virus onto their child during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding.

But although infected mothers in the U.S. can typically receive that type of preventative treatment, ensuring mother-to-child HIV transmission now only rarely occurs in this country, that’s not true everywhere — particularly in developing nations, where women may not have access to prenatal care. Globally, the UN estimates that about 330,000 babies were newly infected with the virus in 2011. That’s why researchers are hailing the case as a potential breakthrough for developing nations, especially if doctors around the world begin administering more aggressive treatments to babies as a standard practice.

According to Rowena Johnston, the vice president and director of research at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, this case “underscores the importance of identifying HIV-positive pregnant women.” Doctors need to be focused on expanding access for treatment to pregnant women around the world, and be willing to immediately put infants on medication, she explained.

“It is also imperative that we learn more about a newborn’s immune system, how it differs from an adult’s, and what factors made it possible for the child to be cured,” Johnston told USA Today in a statement.

The CDC’s most recent HIV Surveillance Report contains the first-ever comprehensive data set allowing researchers to map HIV infections across the entire country. As the agency explains, their new data paints a “complete picture of diagnosed HIV infection in the U.S.,” revealing potential trends in infections across different regions. At least one clear trend emerges among Southern states, where the concentration of HIV infections tend to be higher:

It’s likely no coincidence that many of those same states lack the comprehensive sexual education requirements that would help educate their residents about HIV transmission from an early age. Health classes in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana aren’t required to provide any kind of medically accurate information about HIV. And in two of those states — Texas and Florida — public schools don’t have to offer any type of sexual health education whatsoever.

In fact, just 20 states across the country mandate both sex education and HIV education, while the rest of country’s youth are growing up with significant gaps in their knowledge about sexual health. That’s especially troubling amid reports that, even though new cases of HIV in the U.S. are beginning to stabilize, young people still continue to put themselves at risk for the virus.

The HIV epidemic continues to take a disproportionate toll on men who have sex with men (MSM) — 62 percent of all HIV diagnoses are attributed to male-to-male sexual behavior, even though MSM represent just two percent of the U.S. population — yet the nation’s sexual health requirements also lag behind when it comes to sexual orientation. None of the southern states with the highest rates of HIV infection require public schools to provide LGBT-inclusive information in their health classes — and Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas actually stipulate that teachers must impart negative, shame-based information about homosexuality.

Former surgeon general C. Everett Koop has passed away at the age of the 96. Koop — who described himself as “the health conscience of the country” — was a surprising advocate of comprehensive sex education, despite the fact that he was a staunch social conservative, as a method of combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He also championed anti-smoking campaigns and hoped to reach a day when smoking was completely eradicated in the United States.

Appointed under Ronald Reagan in 1981, Koop brought valuable exposure to an HIV epidemic that Americans were only slowly becoming aware of. In 1988, he orchestrated the largest public health mailing in history by sending an educational AIDS pamphlet to more than 100 million U.S. households — without the Reagan administration’s blessing. Although Koop himself remained “opposed” to homosexuality, he insisted that Americans deserved accurate medical information to safeguard their sexual health and avoid preventable deaths from AIDS.

Koop’s legacy lives on, and the public health campaigns he pushed have seen huge successes over the past few decades. Teen smoking rates have recently dropped to record lows, and the United Nations now believes an end to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic is “in sight.”

In just a week, the United States will hit the deadline for the sequester — the automatic spending cuts that were negotiated during the 2011 debt ceiling deal. The spending cuts will begin going into effect on March 1 unless lawmakers broker a compromise to avert sequestration, as they did at the beginning of this year when they agreed to push the deadline back two months. But so far, there’s no sign of a deal.

The sequester’s across-the-board indiscriminate cuts were designed to force lawmakers to reach a deal to reduce the deficit. If they end up going into effect, they could have disastrous consequences on Americans’ health. Here are the top five ways that sequestration will make the nation a less healthy place:

1. More Americans could be put at risk for foodborne illnesses. The number of Americans who get sick or die after consuming contaminated food has increased 44 percent over the last two years. The FDA is currently stretched too thin after rounds of budget cuts to food safety programs, and the sequester will only worsen the situation even more. Cuts to the FDA would lead to 2,100 fewer food inspections across the country, putting more Americans at risk for contracting foodborne illnesses — which already cost the United States about $152 million each year to treat.

2. Medical researchers will be forced to delay the development of treatments that could help sick Americans. An 8.2 percent across-the-board cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) could set back medical science for a generation, according to a former NIH director. Existing research would have to be scaled back, and new research projects would have to be postponed — potentially eliminating thousands of research positions across the country, and preventing scientists from doing critical work to develop new treatments for chronic conditions and rare diseases.

3. The government will have fewer resources to provide Americans with health coverage. Under Obamacare, an estimated 9 million previously uninsured Americans will gain health coverage in health insurance marketplaces that states are getting ready for 2014 — but sequestration could slow the implementation of that provision by cutting $66 million in grants intended to help states set up those marketplaces. Similarly, the agency that oversees the public Medicare and Medicaid programs will lose more than $60 million for its program management if the sequester cuts go into effect. And reductions in grants that help fund community health centers, which often serve the most vulnerable Americans, could result in 900,000 fewer adults receiving medical care.

4. Thousands of Americans living with mental illnesses could go untreated. The sequester would result in a $275 million cut to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Mental Health Block Grant program, which help Americans access the mental health care they need. That means that up to 373,000 “seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children” may be forced to go without the treatment they rely on, which could lead to an uptick in hospitalizations. And an estimated 8,900 homeless people with mental illnesses may not be able to receive the kind of support — including outreach, treatment, and housing assistance — that is critical to helping their recovery process.

5. Fewer Americans will get screened and treated for HIV. According to the Department for Health and Human Services, the sequestration cuts will have a serious impact on federal official’s ability to continue combating the nation’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since an estimated 20 percent of HIV-positive Americans still don’t know they have the virus, the CDC warns that testing needs to be a top priority — but the cuts to the CDC’s programs would result in about 424,000 fewer HIV tests conducted by state agencies. And an estimated 7,400 fewer patients would have access to their HIV medications through the AIDS Drug Assistance Program.

Twenty five years after an amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act made it illegal for HIV-positive Americans to receive organ transplants from HIV-positive donors — or to even conduct research on such transplants — a bipartisan group of senators is hoping to reverse course.

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) introduced the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act in the Senate on Thursday to “establish a regular review process in which the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary would evaluate the progress of medical research” into organ transplants between two HIV-positive people, with the eventual goal of eliminating the ban on such procedures entirely.

The amendment that led to the current ban was a consequence of the poor understanding of HIV/AIDS-related matters at the time. But as Coburn — who is a physician — said in a press release introducing the legislation, “Our scientific understanding of AIDS is much better than when this research ban was established. Those infected with HIV are now living much longer and, as a consequence, are suffering more kidney and liver failures. If research shows positive results, HIV positive patients will have an increased pool of donors.”

The number of HIV-positive patients successfully receiving liver, kidney, and heart transplants has been on the rise overall, as there is no formal law prohibiting HIV-positive patients from receiving organs from Americans who do not carry the virus. But the new push to end the ban on transplants between two HIV-positive individuals reflects the huge strides in HIV treatments and medical innovation over the last two decades, including the recent FDA approval of a once-a-day HIV treatment pill and vastly increased life expectancy for HIV-positive Americans.

Opening up avenues for organ transplants is especially critical given America’s unsustainable dearth of annually performed transplant operations, which leaves more than 70,000 Americans on transplant lists without the organs they need every year. “With so many lives at stake, it is time to end this outdated ban on research into organ donations between HIV-positive individuals,” Boxer said in the release. A concurrent bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Congresswoman Lois Capps (D-CA), a registered nurse.