- A new report released by the Center for Disease Control says that the rate of annual new H.I.V. infections in the United States are 40 percent higher than previously thought.

The study concludes that the infection rate is 56,300 per year as opposed to the 40,000 a year that was thought to have been the average rate for the last several years. The new findings, experts say, are not necessarily due to more infections, but are a result of improved tests and a more accurate and new statistical methods

Women ages 19 through 64 should be routinely tested for HIV. That's the new recommendation released Thursday by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

In a formal committee opinion published in the August issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the college said obstetrician-gynecologists play an important role in promoting HIV screening for their patients under the recommendations by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

President George Bush on Wednesday approved $48 billion for fighting AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis around the world for next five years.

The amount authorized for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the successful U.S. global AIDS program, is $18 billion more than what Bush had requested. The measure will triple funding for these three diseases

In a first of its kind move, the Los Angeles city council on Tuesday approved a one-year ban on new fast-food outlets in a low-income neighborhood with a high incidence of obesity and diabetes.

The moratorium aims to attract restaurants in the 32-square mile area of South Los Angeles to offer healthier food choices. The ban covers the 500,000 people living in the area, residents of which are mainly Latinos and African-Americans

While there have been significant gains in preventing new HIV infections in different countries, the epidemic is far from over in any part of the world, according to a United Nations report.

The 2008 report on the global AIDS epidemic, produced by the Joint U.N .Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), released on Tuesday, is the most comprehensive review of the epidemic to date with 147 countries reporting data on HIV