Tagged: World Health Organization (WHO)

The World Health Organization is telling couples around the world to get tested together to see if either is infected with HIV.

If one of them is, that partner should start treatment with anti-HIV drugs – even if it's not yet medically necessary.

It's a significant step toward "treatment as prevention," as the new buzzphrase goes in the world of HIV/AIDS. In other words, treating HIV infection right away lowers the chance that the treated person will infect others. Early treatment also reduces transmission of TB, the new guidelines say.

A government advisory committee has reconsidered its advice to keep certain details of bird flu experiments secret.

Revised versions of manuscripts that describe two recent studies can be openly published, the committee now says. The decision could help end a contentious debate that has raged within the scientific community for months.

In response, the editors of two journals immediately said they planned to publish the research soon.

The Obama administration has announced a new policy to handle the risks posed by legitimate biological research that could, in the wrong hands, threaten the public.

The move comes in response to a huge debate over recent experiments on bird flu virus that got funding from the National Institutes of Health. Critics say the work created mutant viruses that could potentially be dangerous for people, or give terrorists a road map for making a bioweapon.

A closed-door meeting to discuss controversial bird flu research is drawing to a close at the World Health Organization in Geneva, and the WHO plans to publicly report on what happened once it's officially over.

"We're very aware that there's a lot of interest in the meeting and that people will want to know, you know, what were the issues that were discussed and did you come to any consensus," noted Keiji Fukuda of the WHO, before the meeting began. "So we will try to make that as clear as possible as quickly as possible."