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Health Check: 26/07/2010

26/07/2010

BBC World Service - Health Check, 26/07/2010

New research on the problems facing people living into old age with HIV.

Claudia Hammond with news from the International AIDS Conference, the mental health benefits of choral singing and the growing trend in India for older women to have fertility treatment.

Two decades ago infection with HIV was more or less a death sentence. Now, provided people can get hold of anti-retroviral drugs, they can live on into old age. But people with HIV may age faster and experience more health problems than other people of the same age. Claudia Hammond speaks to Lisa Power, Policy Director of the Terrence Higgins Trust, who has just presented new research at the 18th International AIDS Conference in Vienna on older people living with HIV. 

BBC Vienna correspondent Bethany Bell has been at the AIDS Conference all week, and discusses two of the top stories which have emerged: research from South Africa which finds that a vaginal gel could cut HIV infections by as much as half; and the problem of soaring HIV infection rates in Eastern Europe and Russia.

For the first time researchers have found evidence that people with mental health problems can get sustained benefits from joining a choir. Claudia speaks to Professor Stephen Clift from the Sidney De Haan Centre for Arts and Health in the UK, who did the research, and Elle Caldon, who founded a choir called the Mustard Seed Singers.

The oldest mother in the world gave birth at the age of 70 and is part of a growing trend in India to go for fertility treatment in order to have children later in life. Our reporter in Delhi, Nivedita Pathak, asks whether pregnancy and childbirth in older women is too risky for mother or baby.

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