Testing HIV Drugs as Prevention

By Carl W. Dieffenbach, Ph.D., Director of NIAID Division of AIDS

Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, PhD

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the number of annual new HIV infections in the United States is actually 40% higher than previously estimated. This means that more than 56,000 Americans are infected with HIV every year despite public education efforts on how to avoid getting infected. Addressing the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is critical, but it’s clear that we need to re-examine our approaches and figure out additional ways to control and curtail the epidemic here in the United States.

At the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, we stand at the forefront of the nation’s HIV prevention research efforts. One of our goals is to develop new scientific strategies to prevent HIV transmission. We've had our share of successes and disappointments, like all areas of science, but we remain optimistic and are committed to ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

"Participation Powers Prevention": Highlights from CDC's 3rd National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media

By Jennie Anderson

Last week Miguel Gomez and I joined 1,000 other public health, social marketing, new media, health education, and health communications leaders at the CDC's 3rd annual National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media in Atlanta. We enjoyed having this opportunity to learn from colleagues (new and old), and present on some of our own new media lessons learned, as we did in past years attending this conference. I presented on a panel with some of our CDC colleagues about user-generated content , highlighting some of our experiences from World AIDS Day and National HIV Testing Day, and Miguel gave a presentation about our AIDS.gov new media strategy .

AIDS.gov Introduces New Blog Feature on HIV/AIDS Research

Beginning this week, AIDS.gov is launching a new blog area focusing on the latest developments in HIV/AIDS research from the agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This is just one more way that we hope to use social media as a method for keeping you in tune with what's happening in the fight to end the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Next week, we welcome guest blogger Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. As a leading federal research institute on HIV/AIDS, NIAID supports and conducts international and domestic research designed to better understand the virus and find new and improved HIV treatments and effective ways to prevent HIV infection. In his initial blog post, Dr. Dieffenbach will discuss NIAID’s research agenda for preventing HIV infections here in the United States.

H1N1 Preparedness, New Media and HIV/AIDS

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is working hard to inform the public about how to prepare for and prevent H1N1 flu.

We wanted to highlight a few new media tools that HHS is using to ensure public engagement and move information quickly.

The Conference Comes to You: Webcasts, Web Conferences, and Webinars

By Michelle Samplin-Salgado

TARGET Center's Web Conference,
The Roles of Peers in HIV Care and Treatment

At AIDS.gov, we work with HIV organizations from all over the country (and sometimes the world!). Often it’s not possible to sit at the same table so we rely on virtual ways to connect. Webcasts, web conferences, and webinars are ways to connect with each other and efficiently share information in cyberspace. These terms are still emerging and are commonly used imprecisely. To make matters more confusing, “web conferencing” is often also used generically, to describe the online technology used by all three forms of communication. If you are considering any of these tools, it might be helpful to think in terms of what you are trying to accomplish, the size and type of your audience, and the need for reusability/later viewing.