Portside

Death rates of African Americans living with HIV dropped 28% between 2008 and 2012. Still, Black people with HIV were 1.5 times more likely to die in 2012 than white people with the virus. They were also 3.2 times more likely to die that year than Latinos with HIV. All of the biomedical interventions in the world will not end the AIDS epidemic in this country unless the people on the frontlines understand them, believe in them, and know how to use them.

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Cuts up copies of HIV that have inserted themselves into the genome.

A radical new gene therapy for HIV using genetically modified cells mimics a rare but natural mutation that makes about 1% of the population resistant to the most common strains of HIV. Scientists were cautious not to draw strong conclusions from the small scale trial, which was designed to assess the safety of the therapy, but the early signs have raised their hopes.