Washington Blade - August 18, 2006

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Health officials yanked public service advertisements urging HIV testing after a gay advocacy group expressed concerns about images depicting young black men in a gun's cross hairs. "Putting the face of a black man in the cross hairs of a gun paints a damaging message about violence and black men," Lee Carson, chair of the Black Gay Men's Leadership Council, wrote in a letter to the city's interim health commissioner last month. The $236,000 campaign, which ended abruptly Aug. 7, was geared at gay and bisexual men and featured the tagline, "Have YOU been hit?" "Given the violence perpetrated against gay men, it is not farfetched to see how this campaign fosters violence," Carson wrote to interim Health Commissioner Carmen Paris. Paris said she "inherited" the campaign and only recently saw the ads. She added, "The right thing to do, of course, is not to promote any message that could be perceived as promoting violence." The campaign was launched May 19 with ads on buses, television, postcards and a website.

Wash. to ban publicly funded sex-reassignment surgery

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - Washington state Medicaid officials are taking steps to end publicly funded sex-reassignment surgery. U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) that he was asking for a federal investigation about Medicaid funding of sex-change operations. However, the state will continue to cover hormone treatment and psychotherapy for low-income people diagnosed with gender-identity disorders. A state appeals board ordered Medicaid last month to pay for two people to travel out of state to undergo sex-reassignment operations, at an estimated cost of $50,000 to $60,000 each. The Department of Social & Health Services, following a state audit and criticism from some legislators, wants to halt the practice in favor of cheaper treatment. Instead of surgery, the state will offer other services, such as hormone treatment and psychotherapy, for those diagnosed with gender-identity disorders. Washington is one of a few states where sex-reassignment surgeries have been covered.

Defense peptide in primates may block human HIV virus

ORLANDO, Fla. - A defense peptide still found in monkeys and lower primates may be the key in helping scientists find a way to develop a drug that would prevent HIV from entering human cells, according to an Aug. 13 article posted on the website MedicalNewsToday.com. Associate Professor Alexander Cole of University of Central Florida said that the virus develops only weak resistance to the defense peptide known as retrocyclin, which is not found in humans or chimpanzees. Cole's findings were published in the June issue of the Journal of Immunology. Retrocyclin was still an effective inhibitor of HIV-1 even after 100 days of continuous exposure to human cells in a laboratory setting, according to Cole's research. Why resistance does not develop quickly with retrocyclin is unclear, but it may be a result of retrocyclin interacting with more than one target on both the cell and virus, the report states.

Ketamine used in depression research

WASHINGTON - A paper published in the Aug. 7 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that researchers are having success treating depression within hours with the drug ketamine, according to an Aug. 8 Washington Post report. Ketamine, also known as the street drug K or "Special K," is an anesthetic. According to the research, 18 patients were injected with ketamine and reported briefly experiencing a mild feeling of dissociation from their bodies, the Post reported. The dissociative symptoms disappeared within two hours, and patients and physicians reported improvement in mood shortly after. More than a third continued to report elevated moods after seven days, and nearly a third reported a complete end of symptoms. Traditional antidepressants typically get these kinds of results only after eight to 10 weeks of treatment, the Post reported. "Psychiatrists have gotten used to the idea we have to wait weeks or months, but we can break the sound barrier and get an antidepressant effect within hours," Carlos Zarate Jr., chief of the mood disorders research unit at the National Institute of Mental Health, told the newspaper.

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