It's been a topsy-turvy week in HIV/AIDS development and medicine.

Within one week, reports broke about the presence of an aggressive and a rapid-acting HIV variant in Cuba and the CDC confirmed a significant decline in the number of HIV-related deaths of U.S. Latinos and African-Americans. In addition to those two bits of news, researchers in California also discovered a vaccine that could halt HIV transmission and infection, and could assist those who are already living with the virus.

Luis Scaccabarrozzi, director of health policy and advocacy at the Latino Commission on AIDS, shared information about HIV/AIDS and its impact on Latino youth and the aging population following the Third Annual Latino Health Advocacy Day in Manhattan, on Feb. 17. He also discussed the untold story of the New York City Garifuna population, which has historically faced marginalization, discrimination, violence and racism and has had to deal with economic, social and health disparities.

Scaccabarrozzi said Hispanics of all ages experience health disparities, but as Latinos age, they struggle with adequate income, housing, physical and mental health and the impact of chronic conditions. Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to die from HIV/AIDS than non-Hispanic white males and Asian-American males. In New York City, Latino men who have sex with men make up 59 percent of all HIV diagnoses for Latinos, making them the subgroup most affected by HIV among Latinos. Also, just half of the HIV positive gay and bisexual men in the U.S. are receiving treatment.

The U.S. Latino gay, bisexual and trans community confront multiple barriers to HIV prevention, treatment and care. They also lack participation in programs that incorporate cultural messages, which address issues of marginalization, homophobia, racism, stigma and anti-immigration sentiments.

HIV infection is five times more prevalent among Latinos over 50 compared to non-Hispanic whites, according to the Latino Commission on AIDS. HIV-infected elders don't fare as well as others because they are unwilling to disclose information about their sex lives or drug usage with their health care providers. However, this racial gap concerning older Latinos isn't simply the result of high-risk behavior but rather structural inequalities, which makes contact with the disease more likely and access to care or treatment less likely.

Doctors and care providers are less likely to inquire about the sexual activity, drug use and risk of HIV contraction for aging clients. Older individuals with HIV also face unique psychosocial challenges, when dealing with neurocognitive functioning, mental health, access to social support and use of coping strategies to aging successfully with HIV. Also, older Latinos with HIV were the least likely to disclose to their status to sex partners (81 percent), followed by blacks (85 percent) in comparison to older whites (92 percent), according to the CDC National HIV Surveillance. This obviously requires societal resources, communication training, sensitivity services and behavior health services to help older Latinos communicate status.

Failure to disclose HIV status to one's partner can be credited for the aggressive HIV variant found in Cuba. Two individuals with HIV should still take every precaution because any failure to protect oneself could result in a mutation of the virus.

"It's not a surprise, about the transformation, if you parallel that with the influenza virus, different strains appear every year, and sometimes the vaccines are more efficient than some year than other years. [But] this doesn't surprise me, that this is the case, it was in Cuba, where they have very advanced technology to diagnose any type of disease," said Myriam E. Torres, PhD, MSPH who is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and director for the Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies in the Arnold School of Public Health, to Latin Post.

There are medical discoveries happening in other parts of the world.

In California, researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in California developed a radical new approach to tackling HIV, whereby they altered the DNA of monkeys to give their cells HIV-fighting properties, which would completely protect them from the virus and the ensuing disease.

The technique applied to the monkeys protected them from all types of HIV for at least 34 weeks. Very high doses, equivalent to the amount of new virus produced in a chronically infected patient, were given to the monkeys. If used on a human, it could not only protect individuals, but it could also be useful for those who already have HIV. The gene-therapy approach imitates receptors and docking points and converts cells into factories that constantly spew out the artificial HIV-killers.

The prototype drug, called eCD4-Ig, mimicks the virus and prematurely launches the docking procedure. The "virus" procedure is executed once, and then it disables a large fraction of HIV-1 strains. Once the eCD4-Ig vaccination is injected into muscle tissue, the virus uses cells to crank out the protective protein, in quantities that could last for years.

Roughly 78 million people have been infected with HIV since 1981, with 39 million having died from AIDS since the 1980s, according to the World Health Organization.

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