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Moldovan Graduates Acquire Jobs
All ten of the orphans ACN sponsors have not only successfully completed their respective eight-month ACN training programs, but all have also secured employment. Currently six graduates are already working, three will begin working in two weeks, and one is traveling to an army base where he will serve as the army's new pastry chef.
This ACN pilot program for orphans has been so successful that through the assistance of an anonymous corporate foundation donor, ACN has established an ongoing sponsorship program for the training of older abandoned and orphaned teens who would otherwise find it difficult to become self-reliant.
ACN's Romania Center Wins Best Practice Award
Romania's Ministry of Labor has awarded its prestigious "Best Practice Award" to ACN's Independent Living Center for HIV-positive teens. The Ministry of Labour,Family and Social Protection annually awards good practice in the field of social inclusion, and ACN is honored that its attempts to promote self-reliance and self-care, rather than welfare, have received this special recognition.
Our Independent Living Center is an apartment in Bucharest that allows all teens who receive assistance from a Romanian NGO to experience independent living in three week shifts. In these centers previously institutionalized children learn the skills necessary, e.g., cooking, ironing, budgeting, shopping, etc. that lead to greater self-reliance.
Donor Steps Forward to Fund Furniture Center
The plan for a furniture-making training center in Romania, noted in "ACN News" last February, will soon be realized thanks to an anonymous corporate donor. A storage shed full of items no longer of value is currently being cleaned out in preparation for the set-up and organization of the training center/production unit. To see a picture of the shed, please refer to: Furniture-making Training Center in Romania Planned.
Anonymous Donor Assists Albino Children
Through an anonymous corporate donor ACN now has the funds to expand a dormitory (built for 18 children) to now accommodate 82 abandoned/orphaned children near Arusha, Tanzania. As well as trying to integrate albino children aged 3-18 with non-albino children, the Center protects its 40 albino children with assistance from the local police, who patrol the area every evening when albino attacks in the region have taken place. The local government has also supported this project by sending two social workers to the Center, and two matrons have arrived sponsored by an African NGO to assist with the care of the children.
In Tanzania, 1 in 1,400 is born with albinism—one of the highest incidences in the world. In comparison, in the UK, 1 in 17,000 children is born with albinism.
Albinos in Tanzania have recently been killed for body parts that are ground and mixed with tribal
medicines into potions that sell for very high prices. There are 73 recorded murders of albinos in Tanzania.
New Orphan Group Commences Training
Through a grant by an anonymous corporate donor, ACN is able to fund a group of ten trainees in a special program ACN has begun for abandoned and orphaned children in Moldova.
Moldova suffered economic difficulty after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Many adults left the country in search of employment, often leaving their children in the care of relatives. When many of these relatives could no longer care for the children left in their care, the government accepted the children into shelters.
There are 63 shelters for children in Moldova, in which thousands of children are living from birth to 19. When these children age-out of the system, without a skill set and unable to pay for a continued education, their options are very limited. Enabling as many of these children as we can to grow into self-reliant adults is one of ACN’s goals. In promoting self-reliance and self-care rather than welfare, ACN has supported and continues to support training programs that help abandoned and orphaned older teenagers acquire the independent living skills and vocational training that they will need in order to become productive members of their respective communities.
Furniture-making Training Center in Romania Planned
Plans begin for a furniture-making Training Center/Production Unit at a center for emotionally abandoned children in Romania. The Training Center will not only provide training for older teens but also will possibly provide them with a means of livelihood once they graduate. Upon graduation the plan is for graduates to either enter the production unit as salaried employees, assist in finding
work with area carpenters, or to start their own business. Funding is being sought for this project.
Albino Children Facing Slaughter in Tanzania
In Tanzania, an ongoing tragedy is taking place where albino children are being killed for body parts used in potions believed to bring great wealth.
ACN is currently raising funds to protect a group of albino children, primarily through the expansion of a small center built for orphaned street children.
This shelter, originally designed to house 18, now provides a safe haven for 82 albino children in desperate need of warmth, food, and protection.
In order to accommodate this growing population, ACN is currently seeking funding for:
- Dormitory expansion
- Re-drilling the compound well to improve drinking water supplies
- Building a small clinic to address the high incidence of skin cancer
- Building an independent living center so that the older children can learn how to transition to self-care
- Procuring a vehicle for the center and providing a salary for a driver/mechanic
- Expanding the compound's school by two additional buildings so that it meets government standards
- Initiating a vocational training program that reflects the needs of the local area, e.g., driver/mechanic could teach mechanic trainees in automotive technology and area vehicle repair could generate income for training program support
- Initiate a micro-financing loan program (and train others in its management) for training program graduates
ACN and IOM Collaborate in Moldova
Assisting Children in Need (ACN) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have collaborated to provide one very special young man in Moldova with training that will enable him to transition from welfare to self-care. Due to the young man's need for privacy, no photos or additional information can be shared.
Ten Moldovan Orphans Start ACN Training
Through your support, our first group of ten Moldovan orphans (18-21) are being assisted in their transition from institutional living to self -reliance either through a ten month hairdressing/manicurist training program or a ten month cooks/confectioners program. One of the unique features of these training programs is that each graduate is guaranteed job placement in the field for which s/he has been trained.
All trainees receive the support of psychologists and social welfare assistants throughout the training and practical training. Female trainees are provided room and board at the training center at the government’s expense and male trainees receive room and board at the Center for Rehabilitation of Adolescents in Chisinau at the government’s expense for the duration of the training.
General Background: In Moldova, the government provides all children with an education through the 9th Grade. Continuing their education requires money--money that many abandoned and orphaned children do not have. Without the funds to continue their education, they finish 9th Grade without knowing how to survive outside of the residential school that has been their home for most of their lives.
Vampire Bats Attack Guatemalan Children
Located on over 100 acres of tropical jungle in Guatemala, an orphanage made a rather unique request of ACN: its 250 children, placed in the orphanage because of abuse, abandonment and extreme poverty, needed to repair the holes in its dormitory roof because of vampire bat attacks.
There had been a rash of vampire bats biting the children at night, gaining access to the dormitory through openings in the roof. While all the children have mosquito nets, when they moved about during sleep, or when they got up to use the restroom, their exposed limbs frequently became targets for the bats.
Roof repair was urgently needed to prevent a new season of bat bites, and ACN granted US$ 5,000 to the orphanage to complete the repair of its roof. This grant underscores ACN’s belief that all abandoned children deserve a safe environment in which to live.
Taiwanese Children Receive Help
ACN has granted US$1,000 to an award–winning Taiwanese orphanage that cares for children abandoned by parents who are either running from the law or serving prison terms. The children range in age from infants to teenagers and are given a program based on ethics, self-worth and confidence-building, and Buddhist philosophy. The Center’s results have been so impressive that people from around the world intern there. The center is the first in the country to address the needs of this special population, and ACN has awarded the grant for the care of the center’s abandoned infants and toddlers.
Dear ACN members,
As I begin planning for my trip to Romania and Moldova (I'll be in Romania on May 29 and 30), I can't help but reflect on you students and what your work means to kids who have not been shown a lot of kindness.
How does one begin to thank students like you for supporting children many of you have never met? When people feel very much alone, it means a great deal when someone reaches out to you--and you have reached out to these kids in ways you cannot imagine. The children we support in Romania delight in your annual visits, and still have difficulty understanding why strangers would care about them as much as you do when they perceive their own countrymen as not caring. They handle their own problems as adults, and I feel a great sense of pride in them for learning how to deal with the tragic circumstances in which they have found themselves. I also feel a great sense of pride in you, as members and supporters of ACN, because you have chosen to stand by these kids in need when others have focused on other priorities.
When ACN began assisting abandoned and physically abused children with HIV/AIDS in Romania, the children we initially supported were quite young. Now these children have grown into older teens. While we continue to concentrate on providing abandoned children with shelter and access to education, medical care, and counseling, we now focus on the children's greatest need--vocational preparation and the training necessary for the now older teen to grow into a self-reliant adult. In promoting self reliance and self-care rather than welfare, we help older teens acquire the necessary independent living skills and vocational training to enable them to eventually leave the foster home, group residence, or institution and become productive members of their respective communities.
We have to give the older teens we support the tools they need to prove themselves productive members of society. We also need to educate the public that many children ACN has supported over the years have not died, and in fact have grown into productive young adults. Young people with HIV/AIDS, the learning disabled, and those from abusive home environments are succeeding in ways never before imagined, and this has been possible because of your fundraising and commitment to them.
When the older HIV+ children we support initially learned that they have friends like you, they almost always privately asked me, "But do they know we have AIDS?" When the older children from physically abusive parents learned that some of you were coming to visit, they were initially concerned that once you learned about their problems "at home," you would not be interested in them. They all required reassurance that you understood their challenges but still wanted to be their friends.
They still lack confidence and need reassurance when it comes to developing friendships with healthy teens because they are used to being made to feel "different." They have felt discrimination all their lives, and some, believe it or not, feel that they do not deserve the same rights as others. Some even feel that they don't deserve friends like you. Yet others are developing more and more self confidence, a confidence that you have helped build.
It is true that many of the children with HIV/AIDS would not be around today without your help. Thank you for being who you are, and for caring as you do.
Sincerely,
Dr. Klein
President & CEO, Assisting Children in Need (ACN)
New Stanford list of HIV mutations vital to tracking AIDS epidemic
In a collaborative study with the World Health Organization and seven other laboratories, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have compiled a list of 93 common mutations of the AIDS virus associated with drug resistance that will be used to track future resistance trends throughout the world.
The researchers analyzed data from about 15,220 patients across the globe to develop an updated and accurate list of the most common, resistance-related mutations of the virus. The list will be published March 6 in the online journal PLoS-One.
"The epidemic is changing, especially as new drugs are being developed," said Robert Shafer, MD, associate professor of infectious diseases and geographic medicine at Stanford and the senior author of the paper. "To effectively track the spread of drug resistance, particularly transmitted drug resistance, you need a sensitive and specific list that's considered standard and is adopted by all the surveillance studies."
The list is important, he said, as it helps countries gauge the effectiveness of their HIV medication programs. But assembling such a list can be a challenge, particularly with a virus that has so many resistance-related variants. On the one hand, if the list is too liberally defined, then HIV drug funders and providers may believe resistance is more widespread than is actually the case.
"That will cause problems in countries. They may be concerned about whether their drugs will work," Shafer said.
On the other hand, if the list is too restrictive, there is a risk of underestimating the actual extent of resistance, he said.
"So there is a real challenge to using the right number of mutations," Shafer said.
In 2007, Shafer and his colleagues published a similar list of 80 HIV mutations that has since served as the basis for global AIDS surveillance work. However, with the scale-up of antiretroviral drug programs in the last two years and the introduction of new medications, resistance patterns have changed. So there was a need for a newly updated reference, he said.
The data used in the study was derived from a publicly available, searchable database that Shafer and his colleagues began at Stanford in 1998. Known as the Stanford HIV RT and Protease Sequence Database, it includes information on the two key proteins targeted by HIV drugs: reverse transcriptase and protease. More recently, the researchers have begun gathering resistance data on integrase inhibitors, the latest class of antiretroviral drugs to be introduced. However, this data was not included in the study, as these drugs are not yet in wide use, particularly in developing countries.
To compile the latest list, the researchers added data from other laboratories in Europe, Canada and the United States to include more than 15,000 sequences from untreated individuals, double the number available in 2007. To ensure geographic diversity, information was included for eight different subtypes of the virus, as these vary from one region of the world to another.
The researchers scoured the data to ensure they included only those mutations that were clearly recognized as causing or contributing to resistance. They excluded polymorphisms, or variants of the virus that can arise naturally, as well as drug-related mutations that occur rarely.
The result was that 16 new mutations were added to the 2007 list, while three were dropped. Shafer said it was reassuring to find minimal changes were needed.
"It shows the first list was quite good," he said.
Shafer's Stanford colleagues in the study are Mark Kiuchi, Tommy Liu, Soo-Yon Rhee and Jonathan Schapiro, MD. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
More information: The Stanford database can be found at: http://hivdb.stanford.edu
Source: Stanford University Medical Center
Charting HIV's Rapidly Changing Journey In The Body
ScienceDaily (Dec. 16, 2008) — HIV is so deadly largely because it evolves so rapidly. With a single virus as the origin of an infection, most patients will quickly come to harbor thousands of different versions of HIV, all a little bit different and all competing with one another to most efficiently infect that person's cells. Its rapid and unique evolution in every patient is what allows HIV to evade the body's defenses and gives the virus great skill at developing resistance to a pantheon of antiviral drugs.
"A huge amount of HIV diversity accumulates in the body of a patient with HIV, and it's a big reason why HIV is such a powerful virus," said Ha Youn Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester and corresponding author of the study.
Lee and colleagues have settled a longstanding question about just how HIV morphs in the body. In a paper published Dec. 12 in PLoS Computational Biology, scientists show that HIV evolution in the body does not occur at a constant rate. Rather, the virus's rate of change suddenly slows when the level of crucial immune cells known as CD4+ T-cells falls in a patient.
The team suggests several possible reasons for why HIV slows its evolution later in the disease process. One is that there are simply fewer immune cells left for the virus to infect. Another possibility is that since the immune system is no longer as effective targeting the virus, the virus no longer feels the "selective pressure" of the immune system, and the virus slows its evolution in response.
Picture a criminal on the lam. When the police are out in force, the criminal must change his disguise more and more to survive, but when fewer police are present, the criminal can change his disguise less often. In the case of HIV, the virus actually eliminates the "police officers" – CD4+ T-cells patrolling the body. As time goes on and fewer immune cells are present to flag HIV, the virus no longer has the need to evolve as rapidly as it did when the cells were out in force.
"In a person with a strong immune system, the virus is constantly on the run – it has to change to survive," said co-author Thomas Leitner, Ph.D., of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who studies viral and bacterial evolution. "But even in a person who has lived with HIV for a decade or more, in most cases, at some point, the immune system weakens. The virus notices and evolves accordingly. It's a very dynamic process."
While the research shows that the virus is creating fewer new versions of itself late in the disease process, the researchers say the clinical implications of the research are unclear. Since the virus's ability to evolve is at the heart of the drug-resistance capability that makes HIV so deadly, the work could help scientists who are trying to figure out new ways to stop the virus.
"It's possible that this work would have some implications for our understanding of drug resistance late in the disease process," said Lisa Demeter, M.D., a University of Rochester virologist not involved in the study. "When HIV is evolving more slowly in a patient, that patient is less likely to develop resistance to treatment so quickly," said Demeter, an expert on how HIV develops resistance and professor of Medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division.
Scientists have debated the pace of change of HIV in the body. Some studies have suggested that the virus evolves slowly in people who live many years with HIV before developing AIDS, while other studies showed that the virus evolves quickly in those patients.
To address the issue, the team developed a mathematical and computational model of how HIV evolves in the body. They tested the model by analyzing the blood from 15 HIV patients whose blood was sampled every few months for anywhere from three to 12 years. The data came from the HIV Sequence Database at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which holds more than 250,000 genetic sequences of HIV from patients around the globe.
The team found that the when the immune system is relatively healthy, the HIV virus evolves at a constant and rapid rate, but when a patient's CD4+ cells decrease, HIV's rate of evolution slows. The shift occurs long before a patient is considered to have AIDS, which is indicated when the CD4+ level drops to 200 cells per microliter of blood. The finding was true of 13 of 15 of the patients.
The team focused its attention on 600 nucleotides of the RNA that make up HIV's env gene, which codes for the protein's outer envelope that the virus uses to bind onto the cells of the host. In the team's study, on average, slightly less than one mutation per month occurred per patient in this swath of the HIV genome during the time when CD4+ levels were relatively high and the rate of change was constant.
That's a very rapid rate of change for one small portion of a virus, especially one so prolific: Every day, the HIV virus population in an infected person – up to 10 billion viral particles – copies itself and recreates 95 percent of its particles. With all that reproducing, and without a high regard for accuracy, one change leads to another, and the results are astounding: Most patients have literally many thousands of different types of HIV virus in their bodies.
"Every single person on Earth who is infected with HIV has his or her own unique HIV population," said Leitner.
As the virus mutates, giving birth to viral offspring called quasispecies, it presents an ever-changing face to the immune system, which is continually adapting itself to keep up with the onslaught. The immune system does a remarkable job fending off the assault, killing most of the viral particles every day. Even so, some of the virus is able to elude the body's defenses and ultimately devastates the immune system in most patients.
In addition to Lee and Leitner, other authors include Alan S. Perelson, Ph.D., a senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was Lee's adviser when she was a post-doctoral researcher at Los Alamos; and Su-Chan Park of Cologne University in Germany. The work was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and its Developmental Center for AIDS Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center, as well as by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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