LOS ANGELES — Sexual minority stress, along with aging-related stress, jeopardizes the mental health of midlife and older gay men, according to a new study published by the American Journal of Public Health.

In the study, sexual minority stress included the men’s perceptions that they needed to conceal their sexual orientation, or that others were uncomfortable with or avoided them because of they are gay.

The study also found that legal marriage for same-sex couples may confer a unique protective effect against poor mental health. Having a same-sex domestic partner or same-sex spouse boosted the emotional health of the studied men, but having a same-sex legal spouse appeared to be the most beneficial relationship arrangement.

Read the full article on the LGBTQ Nation Website.

What is Shigella?

Shigella is one of the bacterial agents that causes acute diarrhea. Symptoms often include cramping, fever and vomiting. The infection spreads easily from person to person by the fecal-oral route since a very small number of organisms are necessary to produce transmission.

How do you catch Shigella?

The Pennsylvania Health Alert Network reports “Shigella outbreaks have been previously reported in MSMs and are usually correlated with having multiple partners combined with unprotected high-risk sexual behavior. The fact that some of these patients are also HIV infected raises added concerns, not only due to the potential for transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections through the same high risk behaviors, but also because immune-compromised individuals can have extended carriage of Shigella.” 

What can you do?

Persons with diarrhea usually recover completely, although it may be several months before their bowel habits are entirely normal. Once someone has had shigellosis, they are not likely to get infected with that specific type again for at least several years. However, they can still get infected with other types of Shigella. Currently, there is no vaccine to prevent shigellosis. However, the spread of Shigella from an infected person to other persons can be stopped by frequent and careful hand-washing with soap.

For more information about Shigella, you can go to the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention Website.

The directory now covers facilities in California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

You can search the directory for screenings in Pennsylvania on the Cancer Network Directory.

New H.I.V. cases and AIDS deaths are both going steadily down in British Columbia, according to data released last week.

“We’re particularly pleased to see that our treatment-as-prevention strategy has taken off big-time,” said Dr. Julio S. G. Montaner, director of the British Columbia Center for Excellence in H.I.V./AIDS. His center was a pioneer in the strategy, which involves searching aggressively for people at risk of H.I.V. infection, talking them into being tested and putting those who are infected on antiretroviral drugs immediately, which lowers by 96 percent the chances that they will infect others.

To read the full article, go to the New York Times Website.

From PsychCentral.com

When people think about body image or eating disorders, they usually imagine young, impressionable girls who come to hate their own bodies because they don’t match unrealistic advertisements, TV shows and movies. And, in fact, most eating disorder awareness and assistance programs are aimed at women.

However, a 2007 study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that women aren’t the only ones who need such programs, as gay and bisexual men may be just as much at risk (or even higher risk) for poor body image and  eating disorders as women. Thus, instead of just focusing on women, it is imperative that eating disorder programs focus on all groups.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and directed by Dr. Ilan H. Meyer, associate professor of clinical Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, and Dr. Matthew Feldman, of the National Development and Research Institute. They surveyed 516 New York City residents, including 126 straight men. The rest were gay or bisexual men, or women.

Their findings indicated that less than 5 percent of heterosexual men suffered from eating disorders of any kind, while more than 15 percent of gay or bisexual men had at some point in their life. [...] When questioned about the underlying cause of the high rates of eating disorders among gay men, Dr. Meyer hypothesized that the predominant values and norms propagated in the gay community promoted a very body-centric outlook. He went on to compare the primary drive to engage in eating disorders among gay men to those of heterosexual women: high societal expectations about physical appearance, and pressure from others to maintain an ideal body weight.

Read the full article at psychcentral.com

Of the nation’s nearly 1.2 million people with the illness, only 28% have a suppressed viral load, according to a CDC study published in the Dec. 2 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. A suppressed viral load improves patients’ health and dramatically decreases their risk of transmitting the virus through sexual activity.

Part of the problem is that the antiretroviral treatment has been so effective that some patients do not see the need to regularly take their medication, said Dr. Sharp, director of the Center for Comprehensive Care in New York City. The center is an HIV/AIDS clinic at St. Luke’s/ Roosevelt Hospital.

“It’s hard for people to believe” what can happen if the virus is left untreated, she said.

At the same time, one in five Americans infected with HIV does not know he or she has the condition, the CDC said. Only about half of people diagnosed with HIV receive ongoing medical care and treatment.

To help remedy the problem, the CDC urges doctors to increase testing for HIV during routine medical visits. The agency recommends that doctors test everyone between ages 13 and 64. People at high risk of contracting the virus, including injection drug users and men who have sex with other men, should be tested at least once a year, the CDC says.

Read the full article on amednews.com.

Anthony Silvestre of the Pitt Men's Study

A frank discussion with the Pitt Men’s Study co-investigator, Dr. Anthony Silvestre:

“The battle against AIDS has produced effective prevention interventions that can help people change their unsafe sexual and drug-using behaviors, and effective treatments to keep people who are infected relatively healthy over the long run. However, the war against AIDS is stagnant. The institutional changes that are necessary to stop AIDS, and to prevent the outbreak of other sexually transmitted diseases, have not occurred. Our professional schools, funders of research, our churches and our educational systems have made precious few changes in how they do business. As a society, we have failed to integrate healthy views about sexuality into our everyday lives. We continue to treat it as the stuff of snickering adolescence or of slick merchandizing.

Clearly, there have been major advances in treatment and the prevention of AIDS. There have been few changes in the attitudes that stigmatize the at-risk populations, and that keep us from maturely responding to sexual-health matters in our schools and universities and other major institutions.”

You can read the full interview at Pittsburgh City Paper Online.

Medical progress now ensures that HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, but only for those who can access good medical care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that almost three out of four Americans with HIV are not receiving enough medicine or regular health care “to stay healthy or prevent themselves from transmitting the virus to others.” Out of the 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV, 850,000 aren’t receiving regular treatment to keep the virus at a low enough level to prevent transmission or hurt their own health and 240,000 Americansdon’t even know they’re infected with HIV.

For some, medical treatment is  hard to come by. A Williams Institute study found that 5 percent of dentists in Los Angeles refused services to those with HIV/AIDs, a rate that is “lower than that of other health care providers. Over the past decade, “55% of obstetricians, 46% of skilled nursing facilities, and 25% of plastic surgeons” in L.A. “had policies that specifically discriminated against people living with HIV or AIDS.” Successful treatment rates “were lowest in blacks and women,” according to CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

Read the full article on Thinkprogress.com.

Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is associated with more deaths than HIV infection, according to sobering new data presented by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday, November 8, at the 62nd annual meeting of the American Association for the Studies of Liver Diseases (AASLD) in San Francisco.

The discouraging findings, presented by Scott Holmberg, MD, MPH, chief of the CDC’s Division of Viral Hepatitis Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch, come from data involving 21.8 million deaths reported to the National Center for Health Statistics
between 1999 and 2007. The only cases included in the analysis involved reports that specified HIV, AIDS, HCV or hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection as possible contributors to the deaths.

Most viral hepatitis deaths occurred in people in the prime of their lives. About 59 percent of people who died of complications related to hepatitis B were between the ages of 45 and 64. The impact of chronic hepatitis C was even more substantial—roughly 73 percent of the deaths related to HCV were in baby boomers.

Not surprisingly, death rates were highest among certain populations. For example, people coinfected with both HBV and HCV faced a 30-fold increase in the risk of death from liver disease or related complications. Alcohol abuse was associated with a four-fold increase in the risk of death. Coinfection with HIV nearly doubled the risk of death from HBV-related complications and quadrupled the risk of death from HCV-associated liver disease.

To read the full article, go to POZ.com.