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Letter from the President, Louis Licitra  Dear Friends, As winter begins to leave us, spring begins with FACT Bucks County continuing to move forward in our commitment to those living with HIV-AIDS.  For over 20 years FACT has been able to serve our communities with individual financial assistance and with grants for education and prevention to those organizations that can provide these services.  With our all-volunteer board, our sponsors, our event volunteers, and with continued public support, we have been able to maintain our funding each year. I am amazed at how we can all work together to help those in need and …

“Small town with big ideas,” and now an App to facilitate official New Hope Celebrates Pride Activities May 12th– 19th 2013  New Hope Celebrates (NHC), the all-volunteer gay and lesbian marketing organization of Bucks County, Pa., announced today that their official New Hope Pride App is now available to download from the iTunes App Store. Through the NHC App, developed in partnership between NHC and EDGE Media Network, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users will be able to keep track of festivities during Pride Week in May as well as all other official New Hope Pride events throughout the year. In …

We are blessed with many friends in our community.  The Bucks Motorcycle Club has donated over $4,000 to FACT from their 2012 Santa Saturday event in Asbury Park.  We deeply appreciate their support and the help that this will give to people in need. Bucks MC’s 37th Santa Saturday, at Paradise in Asbury Park, Raises funds for NJ & PA Charities         Read more at http://www.newyorkqnews.com/2010/11/santasaturday/index.html  BUCKS MC:   http://www.bucksmc.org/

Dr. “G” was our speaker at the Annual FACT AIDS Walk in 2010 FACT would like to recognize Dr. Gugliotta’s accomplishments and give him a big FACT congratulations!  (Information as taken from Hunterdon Health Care posting) Hunterdon Medical Center Infectious Disease Specialist Joseph Gugliotta has helped to identify and successfully treat a new disease, which is transmitted by a deer tick. Joseph Gugliotta, MD, an Infectious Disease Specialist at Hunterdon Medical Center, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine for his work in identifying and successfully treating the first confirmed North American case of a new disease called …

(From Medical News Today) Researchers in the US have identified a natural antiviral protein that stops HIV and certain other deadly viruses like Ebola, Rift Valley Fever, and Nipah, from entering host cells. They hope the discovery will help efforts to develop broad-spectrum antivirals against many of the deadly viruses that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease lists as “priority pathogens” for national biosecurity purposes.  Read more at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/256415.php  

(From Medical News Today) Facebook and other social networking technologies could serve as effective tools for preventing HIV infection among at-risk groups, new UCLA research suggests. In a study published in the February issue of the peer-reviewed journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases, researchers found that African American and Latino men who have sex with men voluntarily used health-related Facebook groups, which were created by the study’s investigators, to discuss such things as HIV knowledge, stigma and prevention and ultimately to request at-home HIV testing kits.   Read more at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/256069.php

New HIV infections among African American women have decreased by 21 percent between 2008 and 2010, according to new figures released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). African American women are far more affected by HIV/AIDS than other women in the USA, with the rate of new infections 20 times greater than white women and 5 times greater than Hispanic women. However, it is hoped that the improvement in rates of HIV infection among African American women will last. Joseph Prejean of the CDC told Reuters, “We are encouraged to see some declines among African-American women… …

(As taken from Nature.com) The huge, ten-year-old US program that provides HIV treatment and prevention in dozens of developing countries needs to begin shifting to host-country ownership of the programs, according to an advisory report released today. The 700-page report, from the US Institute of Medicine, also says that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which spent $15 billion between 2004 and 2011, needs to increase its emphasis on HIV prevention, particularly through sexual transmission. “There really needs to be an emphasis on looking at the prevention portfolio, on sexual transmission,” says Ann Kurth, a member of the …