Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons Tests

Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons Tests | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthPopSci Eco TourTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons Tests But are they accurate? By Rebecca Boyle Posted 11.02.2011 at 5:41 pm 5 Comments
Trinity Test Jack Aeby / Department of Energy

While our friends Jaguar and Ranger toil to model the Earth’s atmosphere, star formation and battery chemistry, other supercomputers are working on classified national security problems. Namely: What happens when a nuclear weapon explodes? Are we sure our nuclear arsenal would actually work, should, God forbid, we decide to use it?

Related ArticlesJaguar, What Are You Working on Today?Jaguar is Getting a GPU Upgrade, to Make it the World's Fastest Supercomputer AgainOak Ridge Labs Using World's Fastest Supercomputer to Model Next-Gen Nuclear PlantsTagsTechnology, Rebecca Boyle, lawrence livermore national laboratory, military, nuclear tests, nuclear weapons, supercomputer, supercomputersAfter live nuclear testing ended (or at least was supposed to end) in 1992, supercomputers supplanted explosions so scientists could continue studying how they work. The nation’s stockpile stewardship program, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration at three national laboratories, checks the nation’s nukes for any problems. Supercomputers at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national labs conduct tests that can in some ways go beyond the detail of any live explosion, as the Washington Post reports.

They have found some good news and some bad news, as Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., puts it: “The good news is that it tells us a lot more about these weapons than we ever knew before. The bad news is that it tells us the weapons have bigger problems that we realized,” he tells the WaPo.

For example, several years ago scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory modeled the life cycle of a nuke, from the moment it leaves storage to the instant it impacts its target. They found some fatal flaws that would cause the warhead to “fail catastrophically,” as the Post quotes Bruce T. Goodwin, Livermore’s principal associate director for weapons programs. The military has since fixed the problem, the Post reports.

The flaw lay in the weapon’s ballistics handling, not its explosivity, so this is something that could never have been revealed in a physical test, the Post notes. The power of supercomputers to model these types of things could negate the need for physical testing, some officials say — but Congress has still not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (although the U.S. abides by it). It turns out not everyone trusts supercomputers. Kyl believes while they are helpful, they’re not a substitute for testing, the Post quotes him saying. “That’s why, even though we’re not testing right now, we should not give up the legal right to test,” he said.

Click through to the Post's account for the full story on how supercomputers are helping model the most explosive forces in nature.

[Washington Post]

Previous Article: See The Data-Centric Universe, Then and NowNext Article: What Are You Doing Today, iForge? 5 Comments Link to this comment D13 11/02/11 at 10:52 pm

what further testing of "nukes" is needed?

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

Link to this comment trireme 11/03/11 at 1:27 am

@ D13- Brand-new-off-the-assembly-line nukes don't need testing, but the US stockpile has many 30+ year old nukes whose components have been bombarded by radiation for all that time. There is a program to refurbish/replace the components on these older weapons, but there is a backlog. Politicians don't like nuclear testing, but many nuclear experts don't trust the computer simulations.

Link to this comment emneumann 11/03/11 at 7:24 am

Not to mention the spontaneous degredation of the fissile and fusable elements that are the true heart of the bomb. Over time, there is less of the U-235 and Deuterium and or Tritium that would produce a lower yield in the best case or prevent a chain reaction altogether in the worst case.

Link to this comment scientific anomaly 11/03/11 at 8:20 am

well thats not extremely good that when its in mid flight it decides to take out the u.s. military base than the enemies. atleast the terrorrists would be dead in the explosion too

-Knock knock
-Who's there?
-The Doctor.
-Doctor Who?
-Yes

Link to this comment Q 11/03/11 at 8:33 am

D13,
Any and all electronic components as they are stored degrade. Some electronic components simply stop working all together sitting on the shelf. With that said, consider how old the original nuclear bombs, missiles and arsenal are. The active ones we have need to be constantly pulled and the electronics constantly test, simply because they are aging.

Besides, over the course of time as you know, there have been many improvements in electronics and so upgrades are made to the weapons too.

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GPS stations can detect clandestine nuclear tests

ScienceDaily (June 8, 2011) — At the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), American researchers are unveiling a new tool for detecting illegal nuclear explosions: Earth's global positioning system (GPS).

Even underground nuclear tests leave their mark on the part of the upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere, the researchers discovered, when they examined GPS data recorded the same day as a North Korean nuclear test in 2009. Within minutes on that day, GPS stations in nearby countries registered a change in ionospheric electron density, as a bubble of disturbed particles spread out from the test site and across the planet.

"Its as if the shockwave from the underground explosion caused the earth to 'punch up' into the atmosphere, creating another shockwave that pushed the air away from ground zero," said Ralph von Frese, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University and senior author on the study.

Jihye Park, a doctoral student in geodetic science at the university, is presenting the results of the study in a poster session at the CTBTO meeting in Vienna, Austria.

International authorities already possess several methods for detecting illegal nuclear tests, Park said. Seismic detectors pick up shockwaves through land, and acoustic sensors monitor for shockwaves through water and the air for tests that happen above ground. Chemical sensors detect airborne radioactive gas and dust as definitive evidence of a nuclear explosion. However, these particles may be lacking if the explosion is contained deeply below ground.

"GPS is a complement to these other methods, and can help confirm that a nuclear test has taken place -- especially when the test was underground, so that its effect in the air is very subtle, and otherwise nearly impossible to detect," she said.

While GPS was designed for location purposes, the technology has always been especially sensitive to atmospheric disturbances, said Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, a professor of geodetic science at Ohio State and Park's advisor.

"GPS signals must pass from transmitters on satellites high above the planet down to ground-based receivers," Grejner-Brzezinska explained. "Air molecules -- more specifically, the electrons and other charged particles in the ionosphere -- interfere with the signal, generating position error. Part of our research concerns how to compensate for that vulnerability and make GPS work better. Jihye found a way to take that vulnerability and turn it into something useful."

Park wrote computer algorithms that search GPS signals for patterns indicating a sudden fluctuation in atmospheric electron density in specific locations, which is what happens when a shockwave pushes a bubble of air through the atmosphere. As the GPS signal passes through the edge of the bubble, the change in electron density disturbs the signal in a noticeable way.

Park was able to utilize data collected from GPS receivers that the International GNSS Service (IGS) has planted around the globe for research purposes. Five of the IGS receivers scattered in Eastern Asia provided data for this study, as did six receivers belonging to the South Korean GPS network.

When Park analyzed the data from the 11 GPS stations, she detected a sudden spike in atmospheric electron density after the May 25, 2009 underground test, which is believed to have happened just before 1:00 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time that day.

Within 25 minutes, the shockwave had traveled 225 miles to the nearest GPS station in the study, which was located in Inje County, in Gangwon Province, South Korea. That means that it was traveling through the air at 9 miles per minute, or 540 miles per hour. Within that first hour, it had reached all 11 stations.

Based on the timing of the shockwave, the researchers traced the origin of the explosion back to P'unggye, in Hamyong Province, North Korea. This finding agrees with seismic data from the event, which was collected by the CTBTO and the US Geological Survey.

The researchers will continue this work as Park earns her PhD, and they are seeking funding and partnerships to expand it further. In the meantime, they have submitted a paper on the discovery to the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Collaborators on the study include Yu Morton, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and Luis Gaya-Pique of CTBTO's On-Site Inspection Division.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Ohio State University. The original article was written by Pam Frost Gorder.

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Proton dripping tests a fundamental force in nature

ScienceDaily (May 11, 2011) — Like gravity, the strong interaction is a fundamental force of nature. It is the essential "glue" that holds atomic nuclei -- composed of protons and neutrons -- together to form atoms, the building blocks of nearly all the visible matter in the universe. Despite its prevalence in nature, researchers are still searching for the precise laws that govern the strong force. However, the recent discovery of an extremely exotic, short-lived nucleus called fluorine-14 in laboratory experiments may indicate that scientists are gaining a better grasp of these rules.

Fluorine-14 comprises nine protons and five neutrons. It exists for a tiny fraction of a second before a proton "drips" off, leaving an oxygen-13 nucleus behind. A team of researchers led by James Vary, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, first predicted the properties of fluorine-14 with the help of scientists in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Computational Research Division, as well as supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. These fundamental predictions served as motivations for experiments conducted by Vladilen Goldberg's team at Texas A&M's Cyclotron Institute, which achieved the first sightings of fluorine-14.

"This is a true testament to the predictive power of the underlying theory," says Vary. "When we published our theory a year ago, fluorine-14 had never been observed experimentally. In fact, our theory helped the team secure time on their newly commissioned cyclotron to conduct their experiment. Once their work was done, they saw virtually perfect agreement with our theory."

He notes that the ability to reliably predict the properties of exotic nuclei with supercomputers helps pave the way for researchers to cost-effectively improve designs of nuclear reactors, to predict results from next generation accelerator experiments that will produce rare and exotic isotopes, as well as to better understand phenomena such as supernovae and neutron stars.

"We will never be able to travel to a neutron star and study it up close, so the only way to gain insights into its behavior is to understand how exotic nuclei like fluorine-14 behave and scale up," says Vary.

Developing a Computer Code to Simulate the Strong Force

Including fluorine-14, researchers have so far discovered about 3,000 nuclei in laboratory experiments and suspect that 6,000 more could still be created and studied. Understanding the properties of these nuclei will give researchers insights into the strong force, which could in turn be applied to develop and improve future energy sources.

With these goals in mind, the Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program brought together teams of theoretical physicists, applied mathematicians, computer scientists and students from universities and national laboratories to create a computational project called the Universal Nuclear Energy Density Functional (UNEDF), which uses supercomputers to predict and understand behavior of a wide range of nuclei, including their reactions, and to quantify uncertainties. In fact, fluorine-14 was simulated with a code called Many Fermion Dynamics-nuclear (MFDn) that is part of the UNEDF project.

According to Vary, much of this code was developed on NERSC systems over the past two decades. "We started by calculating how two or three neutrons and protons interact, then built up our interactions from there to predict the properties of exotic nuclei like fluorine-14 with nine protons and five neutrons," says Vary. "We actually had these capabilities for some time, but were waiting for computing power to catch up. It wasn't until the past three or four years that computing power became available to make the runs."

Through the SciDAC program, Vary's team partnered with Ng and other scientists in Berkeley Lab's CRD who brought discrete and numerical mathematics expertise to improve a number of aspects in the code. "The prediction of fluorine-14 would not have been possible without SciDAC. Before our collaboration, the code had some bottlenecks, so performance was an issue," says Esmond Ng, who heads Berkeley Lab's Scientific Computing Group. Vary and Ng lead teams that are part of the UNEDF collaboration.

"We would not have been able to solve this problem without help from Esmond and the Berkeley Lab collaborators, or the initial investment from NERSC, which gave us the computational resources to develop and improve our code," says Vary. "It just would have taken too long. These contributions improved performance by a factor of three and helped us get more precise numbers."

He notes that a single simulation of fluorine-14 would have taken 18 hours on 30,000 processor cores, without the improvements implemented with the Berkeley Lab team's help. However, thanks to the SciDAC collaboration, each final run required only 6 hours on 30,000 processors. The final runs were performed on the Jaguar system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility with an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) allocation from the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR).

The paper that predicts fluorine-14 was published in Physical Letters C Rapid Communications. In addition to Vary, Pieter Maris, also of Iowa State, and Andrey Shirokov of Moscow State University were co-authors on the paper. In addition to Ng, Chao Yang and Philip Sternberg (a former postdoc), also of Berkeley Lab, and Masha Sosonkina of Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University contributed to the project.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Journal Reference:

P. Maris, J. P. Vary, P. Navratil, W. E. Ormand, H. Nam, D. J. Dean. Origin of the anomalous long lifetime of 14C. arXiv.org, 2011; [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Proton dripping tests a fundamental force in nature

ScienceDaily (May 11, 2011) — Like gravity, the strong interaction is a fundamental force of nature. It is the essential "glue" that holds atomic nuclei -- composed of protons and neutrons -- together to form atoms, the building blocks of nearly all the visible matter in the universe. Despite its prevalence in nature, researchers are still searching for the precise laws that govern the strong force. However, the recent discovery of an extremely exotic, short-lived nucleus called fluorine-14 in laboratory experiments may indicate that scientists are gaining a better grasp of these rules.

Fluorine-14 comprises nine protons and five neutrons. It exists for a tiny fraction of a second before a proton "drips" off, leaving an oxygen-13 nucleus behind. A team of researchers led by James Vary, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, first predicted the properties of fluorine-14 with the help of scientists in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Computational Research Division, as well as supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. These fundamental predictions served as motivations for experiments conducted by Vladilen Goldberg's team at Texas A&M's Cyclotron Institute, which achieved the first sightings of fluorine-14.

"This is a true testament to the predictive power of the underlying theory," says Vary. "When we published our theory a year ago, fluorine-14 had never been observed experimentally. In fact, our theory helped the team secure time on their newly commissioned cyclotron to conduct their experiment. Once their work was done, they saw virtually perfect agreement with our theory."

He notes that the ability to reliably predict the properties of exotic nuclei with supercomputers helps pave the way for researchers to cost-effectively improve designs of nuclear reactors, to predict results from next generation accelerator experiments that will produce rare and exotic isotopes, as well as to better understand phenomena such as supernovae and neutron stars.

"We will never be able to travel to a neutron star and study it up close, so the only way to gain insights into its behavior is to understand how exotic nuclei like fluorine-14 behave and scale up," says Vary.

Developing a Computer Code to Simulate the Strong Force

Including fluorine-14, researchers have so far discovered about 3,000 nuclei in laboratory experiments and suspect that 6,000 more could still be created and studied. Understanding the properties of these nuclei will give researchers insights into the strong force, which could in turn be applied to develop and improve future energy sources.

With these goals in mind, the Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program brought together teams of theoretical physicists, applied mathematicians, computer scientists and students from universities and national laboratories to create a computational project called the Universal Nuclear Energy Density Functional (UNEDF), which uses supercomputers to predict and understand behavior of a wide range of nuclei, including their reactions, and to quantify uncertainties. In fact, fluorine-14 was simulated with a code called Many Fermion Dynamics-nuclear (MFDn) that is part of the UNEDF project.

According to Vary, much of this code was developed on NERSC systems over the past two decades. "We started by calculating how two or three neutrons and protons interact, then built up our interactions from there to predict the properties of exotic nuclei like fluorine-14 with nine protons and five neutrons," says Vary. "We actually had these capabilities for some time, but were waiting for computing power to catch up. It wasn't until the past three or four years that computing power became available to make the runs."

Through the SciDAC program, Vary's team partnered with Ng and other scientists in Berkeley Lab's CRD who brought discrete and numerical mathematics expertise to improve a number of aspects in the code. "The prediction of fluorine-14 would not have been possible without SciDAC. Before our collaboration, the code had some bottlenecks, so performance was an issue," says Esmond Ng, who heads Berkeley Lab's Scientific Computing Group. Vary and Ng lead teams that are part of the UNEDF collaboration.

"We would not have been able to solve this problem without help from Esmond and the Berkeley Lab collaborators, or the initial investment from NERSC, which gave us the computational resources to develop and improve our code," says Vary. "It just would have taken too long. These contributions improved performance by a factor of three and helped us get more precise numbers."

He notes that a single simulation of fluorine-14 would have taken 18 hours on 30,000 processor cores, without the improvements implemented with the Berkeley Lab team's help. However, thanks to the SciDAC collaboration, each final run required only 6 hours on 30,000 processors. The final runs were performed on the Jaguar system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility with an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) allocation from the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR).

The paper that predicts fluorine-14 was published in Physical Letters C Rapid Communications. In addition to Vary, Pieter Maris, also of Iowa State, and Andrey Shirokov of Moscow State University were co-authors on the paper. In addition to Ng, Chao Yang and Philip Sternberg (a former postdoc), also of Berkeley Lab, and Masha Sosonkina of Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University contributed to the project.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Journal Reference:

P. Maris, J. P. Vary, P. Navratil, W. E. Ormand, H. Nam, D. J. Dean. Origin of the anomalous long lifetime of 14C. arXiv.org, 2011; [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Novel noninvasive tests for early cancer detection

ScienceDaily (May 3, 2011) — Researchers at last month's AACR conference in Orlando demonstrated that they are intensifying their efforts to identify and validate various types of biomarkers that are detectable in readily accessible bodily fluids such as blood and urine, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN). The goal is to detect biosignatures that are more specific and sensitive than existing diagnostic modalities, according to the May 1 issue of GEN .

"The molecular diagnostic approach is geared toward finding tumors earlier in the course of disease," says John Sterling, Editor in Chief of GEN. "This could reduce the need for more invasive and costly biopsies and imaging studies and lead to earlier therapeutic intervention."

At the AACR meeting, Harvey Pass, M.D., New York University Langone Medical Center and Cancer Center, discussed his group's experience working in collaboration with SomaLogic to develop an aptamer-based diagnostic to detect malignant mesothelioma in asbestos-exposed individuals. Dr. Pass presented data derived from the application of biomarker subsets to a blinded test set, demonstrating 100% specificity and 80% sensitivity for their ability to distinguish asbestos-exposed controls from mesothelioma cases.

Another presentation pointed out that measurement of CA125 in the blood is the test currently used to monitor ovarian cancer treatment, follow patients for recurrence, and in some cases screen high-risk individuals to detect early-stage disease. In her conference talk, Christine Coticchia, Ph.D., Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, emphasized that CA125 is relatively nonspecific for ovarian cancer and uninformative in a substantial percentage of patients. Dr. Coticchia and colleagues are studying a combination of two matrix metalloproteases, MMP-2 and MMP-9, in urine for their utility as biomarkers to predict the presence of ovarian cancer in women with normal CA125 levels.

Other research projects covered in the GEN article include work at Celera, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Michigan Health System, Gen-Probe, University of California at San Diego Medical Center, Université Laval, Dianon Systems, Aarhus University Hospital, Hvidovre Hospital, University of Copenhagen, and Exiqon.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

Vicki Glaser. Cancer Detection Improved with Noninvasive Testing. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, May 1, 2011 (Vol. 31, No. 9) [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Study tests interventions targeting multiple health-related behaviors in African American couples

ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — Interventions to promote healthy behaviors, including eating more fruits and vegetables, increasing physical activity, and participating in cancer screenings, as well as prevention of HIV/sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), appear beneficial for African-American couples who are at high risk for chronic diseases, especially if one of the individuals is living with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).

The report is published in the April 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

As background information in the article, the authors write that the medications being used to treat HIV, particularly highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), have been so successful for many individuals that they are now living longer and are at risk for developing other chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. "The issue of comorbid chronic disease is particularly worrisome for the 48 percent of people living with HIV in 2007 who were African American," the authors note.

Nabila El-Bassel, Ph.D., and colleagues from the National Institute of Mental Health Multisite HIV/STD Prevention Trial for African-American Couples Group, tested how well an intervention would work that addressed multiple health-related behaviors in African-American heterosexual couples in which one partner was HIV-positive and the other was not. The 535 couples (1,070 participants) were randomized into two groups: 520 individuals (260 couples) participated in couple-focused HIV/STD risk reduction focusing on preventing HIV/STD transmission and acquisition and 550 individuals (275 couples) were in the individual-focused health promotion group to influence behaviors linked to the risk of cardiovascular diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus and certain cancers, including physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, fat consumption, breast and prostate cancer screenings and alcohol use. Both interventions consisted of eight weekly structured two-hour sessions. Participants independently reported their health behaviors at the beginning of the study, immediately after the interventions, and six to 12 months post-intervention. The average age of the participants was about 43 years and the HIV-positive partner was female in 60.4 percent of the couples.

"Health promotion intervention participants were more likely to report consuming five or more servings of fruits and vegetables daily and adhering to physical activity guidelines compared with HIV/STD intervention participants," the authors found. "In the health promotion intervention compared with the HIV/STD intervention, participants consumed fatty foods less frequently, more men received prostate cancer screening, and more women received a mammogram. Alcohol use did not differ between the intervention groups." The authors suggest that it is "possible that targeting couples enhanced efficacy. Research suggests that health promotion strategies that incorporate family members and support networks are more effective than individual-focused strategies and may be especially appropriate for African Americans."

"In conclusion, African Americans are at high risk for morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases and are less likely to report engaging in behaviors associated with reduced risk of such diseases and to detect them at an early stage. Moreover, the risk of chronic disease is of particular concern for African Americans living with HIV because HIV and its treatment with HAART are associated with increased risk. The present study revealed low rates of fruit and vegetable consumption, physical activity and cancer screening in African American individuals in HIV-serodiscordant couples. Accordingly, this study is important, demonstrating that a theory-based contextually appropriate intervention that teaches skills caused positive changes on multiple behaviors linked to chronic diseases in African American members of HIV-serodiscordant couples."

Editorial: Human Immunodeficiency Virus Is (Once Again) a Primary Care Disease

In an accompanying editorial, Mitchell H. Katz, M.D., from the Los Angeles Department of Health Services, Los Angeles, notes that "if specialty care is less needed than it used to be for HIV-infected patients, it turns out primary care is more needed. Owing to the advances in HIV treatment, our patients are no longer dying: They are aging!"

"Although serodiscordant couples are a highly specialized population, there is no reason to believe that their intervention would not work among other HIV-infected persons. Certainly, this study should encourage others to attempt group health promotion classes because, as I often tell my HIV-infected patients with diabetes, liver disease or uncontrolled hypertension, 'It's not HIV that's going to kill you.'"

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by JAMA and Archives Journals.

Journal References:

N. El-Bassel, J. B. Jemmott, J. R. Landis, W. Pequegnat, G. M. Wingood, G. E. Wyatt, S. L. Bellamy. Intervention to Influence Behaviors Linked to Risk of Chronic Diseases: A Multisite Randomized Controlled Trial With African-American HIV-Serodiscordant Heterosexual Couples. Archives of Internal Medicine, 2011; 171 (8): 728 DOI: 10.1001/archinternmed.2011.136M. H. Katz. Human Immunodeficiency Virus Is (Once Again) a Primary Care Disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 2011; 171 (8): 719 DOI: 10.1001/archinternmed.2011.130

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here