Welcome to HIV Weekly, a weekly email bulletin that will provide people with, or affected by, HIV a concise, plain English digest of a selection of the very latest HIV news.

This new digest puts the latest HIV news stories into their context to equip you with the knowledge to understand what the latest research might mean for your HIV treatment and care.

Information on the latest NAM treatment information resources and those produced by other key organisations such as the UK Coalition and THT are also included.

HIV Weekly is edited by Michael Carter, NAM's patient information and news editor.

An HIV Weekly archive will be provided online.

This edition of HIV Weekly provides an analysis of more news from the 45^th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), a major annual HIV conference, that was held in Washington DC just before Christmas.

The news is divided into four main sections:

• New drug: the experimental protease inhibitor TMC114 has been shown to be superior to other ritonavir-boosted protease inhibitors for people who had taken a lot of anti-HIV drugs before.

• Treatment strategies: using an HIV drugs combination that only includes two protease inhibitors -  Kaletra (lopinavir boosted by ritonavir) together with saquinavir (Invirase) -  is just as effective as traditional HIV treatment involving drugs from two of the anti-HIV drug classes.

• Predicting the success of treatment: it is possible to predict the longer-term success of HIV treatment by looking at viral load between six and 18 months after HIV drugs are first started.

• Illness: a study shows that illness and death in HIV-positive people taking treatment is most likely to be due to issues unrelated to either HIV or the side-effects of HIV drugs; two studies looked at the risk of anal or cervical cancer; and a study found that people with a good immune system who develop tuberculosis don’t need to start anti-HIV drugs immediately.

New drugs

Illness