Singapore - The City-State recorded 422 new HIV infections last year, the highest number in a single year since records started in 1985, the government said.

More than half of the new cases already had late-stage HIV infections when they were diagnosed, as happened in previous years, the Health Ministry said. It urged people who are at high risk of contracting the virus to go for tests.

“There is thus an urgent need for persons who engage in high risk behavior such as unprotected casual sex, sex with prostitutes, and intravenous drug abuse to go for regular HIV testing,” the ministry’s Web site said in an update of the HIV/AIDS situation in the prosperous Southeast Asian country.

Ninety-three percent of the new infections were among men and 95 percent were transmitted through sex, it said.

Nearly two-thirds of the sexual transmissions occurred during heterosexual sex, the update said.

It said the number of intravenous transmissions fell last year to seven, half of the number recorded in 2006.

The new cases bring the total number of known HIV-infected Singaporeans to 3,482 as of the end of last year, the ministry said. More than 1,100 of them have died.

The ministry also noted that Parliament last week passed an amendment to the law to tighten regulations on HIV transmissions.

The existing law penalized anyone who knows he or she is infected with HIV but is found to have failed to tell a partner about it before sex. The amendment includes individuals “who have reason to believe” that they have been exposed to a significant risk of contracting HIV or AIDS.

The amendment says those individuals must take “reasonable precautions” — such as using condoms or being tested — to protect their sexual partners. Otherwise, they must inform their partner of the risk of contracting HIV from them and leave it to them to accept the risk if they wish. If the partner accepts, no legal offense is committed.

A person found guilty of not informing a partner or of failing to take such precautions faces a maximum penalty of a S$50,000 fine and 10 years’ imprisonment.

New York - A UN study urged Asian governments on Wednesday to boost funding for AIDS prevention, warning that failure to do so will lead to nearly 500,000 deaths each year across the continent from the scourge by 2020.

The figure is up from the 440,000 that currently die each year, according to the report commissioned by the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

The study also said the overall number of infected people would likely double to 10 million by 2020 if prevention efforts are not implemented.

“Despite a declining trend of new HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) infections in a few countries, AIDS still accounts for more deaths annually among 15 to 44 year-olds than do tuberculosis and other diseases,” it noted.

“The costs of inaction are simply too high,” said the chairman of the Commission on AIDS in Asia, Dr Chakravarthi Rangarajan, as he presented the report to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“Without concerted and evidence-based responses, Asia can expect an economic (annual) loss of two billion dollars by 2020.”

While the international spotlight is often focused on AIDS in Africa, UNAIDS has been sounding the alarm about the impact in Asia as well.

“I’m the new face of AIDS, as a young Asian woman,” said Frika Chia Iskandar, the Indonesian coordinator of the Asia Pacific Network of People living with HIV and AIDS.

“For Asia, let’s not wait for the crisis to happen,” she told reporters.

Ban appealed to Asian countries to implement the Rangarajan-led panel’s recommendations, including increased funding for prevention efforts.

“Asian countries can avert massive increases in infections and death, prevent economic losses, and save millions of people from poverty,” he noted. “Such leadership is critical in Asia today.”

“We will never see equitable progress if some parts of the population are still denied basic health and human rights — people living with HIV, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and young people who inject drugs,” the UN chief added.

“Today less than 20 percent of the resources required to tackle AIDS (in Asia) are available,” said UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot.

Indeed Rangarajan’s report noted that last year, an estimated 1.2 billion dollars was available for AIDS programs in Asia, while the amount needed “for an effective response” was estimated at 6.4 billion dollars.

The study said “a minimum of 0.30 percent per capita must be spent annually on prevention for it to be effective.”

It noted that an annual budget of one billion dollars for focused prevention programs among most-at-risk populations could reduce infections by 60 percent in Asia.

Piot said the findings showed “the diversity of the AIDS epidemics in Asia and the need for countries to understand what is driving their epidemics and how to reach populations most at risk of HIV infection.”

The 238-page report noted that HIV transmission in Asia was driven primarily by three high-risk behaviors: unprotected commercial sex, injecting drug use and unprotected sex between men.

It cautioned that “reliable HIV data is a precondition for taking effective action against the epidemics.”

It also said that prevention programs should focus on increasing the consistent use of condoms during paid sex and by men engaging in gay sex.

The programs should also focus on protecting wives of men who buy sex, and on providing sex education in schools and colleges, according to the study.

The report, the most comprehensive study on the AIDS epidemic in Asia, was based on online responses from hundreds of representatives of community groups involved in AIDS-related work throughout the region.

Across Asia, an estimated 4.9 million people were living with HIV, including 440,000 newly infected in the past year, while about 300,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2007, according to UNAIDS’s annual report issued in late 2007.

It showed Southeast Asia had the highest prevalence of HIV in the continent, with Indonesia having the fastest rate of growth of HIV-infected people.

More than 33 million people around the world are living with HIV or AIDS, according to UNAIDS.

Los Angeles - U.S. researchers have discovered the genetic circuit in HIV that controls whether the virus turns active or stays dormant, and have succeeded in forcing the virus toward dormancy.

The findings show promise as an avenue for HIV therapy, according to researchers at the University of California (UC), SanDiego and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Their findings were published in the March 16 issue of the Nature Genetics journal.

The study shows how a developmental decision between HIV’s two “replication fates” is made. The authors were able to measure the level of “noise” or randomness in HIV gene expression and use this noise to probe how HIV decides to replicate or remain dormant.

This method is somewhat like finding a radio station by homing in on regions with the most static. It provides a new tool for probing cellular and viral regulation, and for understanding how other biological decisions are made, notably how stem cells choose between different developmental fates.

“It’s significant for two reasons,” said Leor S. Weinberger, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego.

“First, many researchers are interested in determining which cellular processes generate biological noise. We, instead, asked if the cellular noise could tell us anything about HIV and the cell — and it did. What it told us is how a developmental decision is made by HIV,” he said.

“We still don’t understand how developmental decisions are made at the single-cell level — for example, how a particular stem cell differentiates into many different cell types — and whether noise can drive this decision. Surprisingly, viruses appear to be good models for understanding this type of cellular decision-making,” the scientist added.

Weinberger’s previous work found that the HIV circuit is driven by cellular noise, or random events, which activate the circuit for a limited amount of time before it turns off. In the current study, Weinberger and his colleagues were able to exploit this noise in the Tat circuit, the genetic master switch of HIV, to measure how long the virus remained activated in the cell, and deduce that the time spent in the active state drove HIV’ s decision to destroy the cell or not.

Then the researchers increased the levels of the native cellular gene SirT1 (a gene implicated in aging) to reduce the lifespan of the HIV virus and force HIV-infected cells to go dormant.

Further studies are now under way in Weinberger’s lab on the feasibility of using this approach for anti-HIV therapy.

Ottawa - Canadian researchers have discovered a gene that can block certain forms of HIV and may perhaps one day be used to prevent the onset of AIDS.

Scientists from the University of Alberta identified a human gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection by preventing the virus from replicating.

When researchers prevented human cells from turning on TRIM22, the natural defense system generated by the body when a foreign invader attacks, the cells could not protect themselves against HIV.

“This means that TRIM22 is an essential part of our body’s ability to fight off HIV,” Dr. Stephen Barr, a researcher in the department of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Alberta, said.

Other genes in the TRIM family have also been shown to prevent viruses from replicating. TRIM5a blocks the early replication ofHIV-1 while RhTRIM5a blocks late-stage HIV replication.

The scientists are now exploring how this gene can be turned on in people who cannot defend themselves against the virus.

“We hope that our research will lead to the design of new drugs and/or vaccines that can halt the person-to person transmission of HIV and the spread of the virus in the body, thereby blocking the onset of AIDS,” said Barr.

He acknowledged that such development could be decades away.

The study was done with the cooperation of the University of Pennsylvania. It was published on Thursday in the “Public Library of Science journal Pathogens”.

Beijing - Authorities are working on China’s first national program to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS among gay men, the Ministry of Health said in its 2008 work agenda released on Wednesday.

The program aims to strengthen measures to prevent and control the deadly disease among the homosexual community, Wang Weizhen, deputy director of the HIV/AIDS prevention department under the ministry’s disease control bureau, told China Daily.

“By learning more about gay people, we can better protect them against this incurable disease,” Wang said.

“Studies are under way in several cities to collect information on gay men, such as their distribution and behavioral patterns,” Wang said.

Other measures, including special funding, technical support and information sharing, are also included in the program, she said.

China has between 5 million and 10 million gay men, who are in the highest risk group of contracting HIV and AIDS, Wu Zunyou, director of the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, said.

And the number of new infections among this group is rising drastically, he said.

According to figures from the Ministry of Health, of the 700,000 Chinese living with HIV/AIDS, 11 percent of them contracted the virus through gay sex.

And the situation is getting worse, Wu said.

In 2005, homosexual sex accounted for just 0.4 percent of all new infections reported. Last year, the figure had risen to 3.3 percent, he said.

Despite existing regulations and measures to curb the spread of the disease, new programs targeting special groups, such as gay men, should be developed, he said.

“This is good news for China’s gay community,” Xiao Dong, who heads a Beijing-based information support group, said.

“The government is beginning to take this long-neglected segment of society into consideration in a bid to combat this deadly disease,” he said.