This Month in HIV

Although women now account for nearly half of all people living with HIV worldwide and more than 25 percent of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the U.S., many aren't getting the support they need. Women are less likely than men to see a doctor for HIV, and are also less likely than men to continue in care. All of this makes HIV-positive women more at risk of dying of an HIV-related illness than HIV-positive men. This situation can be dramatically changed if women were able to take better charge of their care.

What do you need to know in order to live a long and healthy life if you're a woman living with HIV? We asked this question of two women: one an HIV specialist, the other an HIV-positive treatment educator. They put together a checklist of 16 essential things HIV-positive women can do to ensure they get the care they deserve from their health care providers. Listen to this podcast or read the transcript to discover these invaluable tips.

What does it mean when your HIV develops resistance to many HIV medications? If you have drug resistance, what are your options? In the bad old days, if your HIV developed drug resistance, it was often a challenge for physicians to cobble together a powerful second regimen. As more and more people with HIV developed drug resistance, "salvage" therapy -- or, as we prefer calling it, "rescue" therapy -- became one of the hottest topics in HIV treatment.

But the times are changing. If you are someone whose HIV has developed resistance to lots of HIV drugs, there are now

more HIV medications than ever before that can help you -- and there are even more drugs in development. The key is making sure that you and your HIV doctor have the knowledge you need to come up with a treatment regimen that works for you.

That's why, for our April edition of "This Month in HIV," we've interviewed two experts who can break down this issue for people who aren't experts: physician and researcher Eric Daar, M.D., and Jeff Berry, an 18-year HIV survivor and editor of Test Positive Aware Network's Positively Aware.

How do you make heads or tails of an HIV medical conference with 1,000 presentations? Surely the 14th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections -- better known as CROI -- is a gold mine of critical studies on every facet of HIV, from prevention to treatment to quality of life. We've covered this conference extensively on our site, but for people with nonmedical backgrounds, this coverage may be difficult to put into context.

That's why, for our March edition of "This Month in HIV," we've interviewed two experts who can break down the conference highlights for people who aren't experts. Physician and researcher Joel Gallant, and HIV-positive activist Nelson Vergel, tell us about the breaking research that really mattered at CROI this year.

Though African Americans have been disproportionately affected by HIV for years, much of the community seems not to have noticed. Since 1999, Phill Wilson, the founder and director of Black AIDS Institute, has worked tirelessly to make sure that HIV is on the African-American agenda. He's helped break years of silence on HIV within the black community by bringing together some of black America's most prominent leaders. What makes Phill's efforts all the more inspiring is that he is HIV positive himself -- in fact, he's been living with HIV for 26 years.

In February, Phill sat down with us to talk about the current state of the black HIV epidemic in the United States and what must be done to curb the alarmingly high rates of HIV among African Americans.