Early mortality (pre and post antiretroviral treatment) amongst children with HIV/AIDS enrolled in two programs in Cambodia

Mexico AIDS Conference 200

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful privacy-preserving decentralized systems

Idiopathic CD4+ T-lymphocytopenia with cryptococcal meningitis: first case report from Cambodia.

We report on a patient with cryptococcal meningitis with CD4+ T-lymphocytopenia and no evidence of HIV infection

Cervial cancer screening among HIV-positive women in rural Cambodia: a pilot programme

Mexico AIDS Conference 200

'I'm fed up': experiences of prior anti-tuberculosis treatment in patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV

To understand the impact of past experiences of anti-tuberculosis treatment among patients co-infected with the human immunodeficiency virus and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) on perceptions and attitudes towards treatment

An artificial neural network predictor for tropospheric surface duct phenomena

International audienceIn this work, an artificial neural network (ANN) model is developed and used to predict the presence of ducting phenomena for a specific time, taking into account ground values of atmospheric pressure, relative humidity and temperature. A feed forward backpropagation ANN is implemented, which is trained, validated and tested using atmospheric radiosonde data from the Helliniko airport, for the period from 1991 to 2004. The network's quality and generality is assessed using the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) Curves (AUC), which resulted to a mean value of about 0.86 to 0.90, depending on the observation time. In order to validate the ANN results and to evaluate any further improvement options of the proposed method, the problem was additionally treated using Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) classifiers, trained and tested with identical data sets for direct performance comparison with the ANN. Furthermore, time series prediction and the effect of surface wind to the presence of tropospheric ducts appearance are discussed. The results show that the ANN model presented here performs efficiently and gives successful tropospheric ducts predictions

Ocular inflammatory disease and ocular tuberculosis in a cohort of patients co-infected with HIV and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Mumbai, India: a cross-sectional study.

The prevalence and the patterns of ocular inflammatory disease and ocular tuberculosis (TB) are largely undocumented among Multidrug Resistant TB (MDR-TB) patients co-infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and on antituberculosis and antiretroviral therapy (ART)

Second-line failure and first experience with third-line antiretroviral therapy in Mumbai, India

Background: There are limited data on the failure of second-line antiretroviral therapy (ART) and the use of third-line ART in people living with HIV in resource-limited settings. Since 2011, the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) HIV/tuberculosis programme in Mumbai, India, has been providing third-line ART to patients in care. Objective: To describe the experiences and programmatic challenges during management of suspected second-line ART failure and third-line ART therapy for patients living with HIV, including the use of HIV viral load (VL) testing. Design: This was a retrospective, observational cohort study of patients with suspected second-line ART treatment failure, who were followed for at least 12 months between January 2011 and March 2014. Results: A total of 47 patients with suspected second-line failure met the inclusion criteria during the study period. Twenty-nine of them (62%) responded to enhanced adherence support, had a subsequent undetectable VL after a median duration of 3 months and remained on second-line ART. The other 18 patients had to be initiated on a third-line ART regimen, which consisted of darunavir–ritonavir, raltegravir, and one or more appropriate nucleoside or nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors, based on the results of HIV genotype testing. Of the 13 patients for whom follow-up VL results were available, 11 achieved virological suppression after a median duration of 3 months on third-line ART (interquartile range: 2.5–3.0). No serious treatment-related adverse events were recorded. Conclusions: With intensive counselling and adherence support in those suspected of failing second-line ART, unnecessary switching to more expensive third-line ART can be averted in the majority of cases. However, there is an increasing need for access to third-line ART medications such as darunavir and raltegravir, for which national ART programmes should be prepared. The cost of such medications and inadequate access to VL monitoring and HIV genotype testing are currently major barriers to optimal management of patients failing second-line ART

Adverse Events among HIV/MDR-TB Co-Infected Patients Receiving Antiretroviral and Second Line Anti-TB Treatment in Mumbai, India.

Significant adverse events (AE) have been reported in patients receiving medications for multidrug- and extensively-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB & XDR-TB). However, there is little prospective data on AE in MDR- or XDR-TB/HIV co-infected patients on antituberculosis and antiretroviral therapy (ART) in programmatic settings

Is screening for diabetes among tuberculosis patients feasible at the field level?

Supported by the TB Union/MSF Course on Operational Researc