This week, a 17-member advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously to recommend the approval of the first-ever completely in-home HIV test. But Art Caplan, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, sees some major ethical dilemmas facing this major medical development.

We have known about Truvada for a while. Now, an influential advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration has endorsed the drug shown to prevent HIV infection in healthy people. It recommended approval of the pill for people at risk of contracting the virus. A final decision is expected next month, but if FDA does approve, it won't be without a degree of controversy. We're joined by Dr. Kenneth Mayer, medical research director at Fenway Health in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

By most accounts, the history of AIDS begins sometime in the late 1970s, before the first official cases were diagnosed in 1981 among a handful of gay men. But a striking new book by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, upends medical history. In "The Origins of AIDS," Pépin traces the roots of the disease back to 1921 when a handful of bush-meat hunters in Africa may have been the first to be exposed to infected chimpanzee blood.

A study released on Monday shows that women using two popular hormonal contraceptives put themselves — and their partners — at greater risk for HIV. While this is a problem for all users of these drugs, it is particularly worrying to people in southern and eastern Africa, where these affordable and easily available contraceptives are used in a very high risk environment.

Two new studies released on Wednesday show that taking a daily pill designed to fight AIDS can actually prevent an uninfected person from contracting HIV. Donald G. McNeil, Jr., science and health reporter for The New York Times, wrote about this potentially monumental find in today's paper, and has the latest on the story. 

Physicists used andom-matrix theory—a mathematical method for finding otherwise hidden correlations within groups of data—in the 1990s and early 2000s to predict stock market volatility. Arup Chakraborty, a chemistry and chemical engineering professor at MIT, is a researcher at the Ragon Institute in Massachusetts. Ragon and a scientific collegue used random-matrix theory to analyze enzymes, and develop new ways to treat HIV. 

Coca-Cola is available nearly everywhere in the world, including many remote places in Africa, such as throughout the landlocked country of Zambia. What if medications for HIV and malaria were as cheap, widely available and heavily distributed as Coke? That's the thinking behind ColaLife, a project founded by Simon Berry, who has been an aid worker in Africa for years. Berry speaks with us about his organization.

The International AIDS conference in Vienna is underway and there's excitement about a new study showing that there may be a new effective microbicide to help prevent against HIV infection. Science Magazine correspondent, Jon Cohen is at the conference. He says that the microbicide is not ready for general use and that more trials are needed. He also says that this is part of a combination prevention and that condoms and behavioral change are still necessary.

There's good news in the fight against HIV. A new South African study has found that a microbicide gel containing the antiretroviral medication, Tenofovir can significantly reduce the rate of HIV infections. The study included almost 900 volunteers and showed that the gel cut a woman's chances of being infected by 50 percent after the first year.

A St. Louis veterans hospital may have infected thousands of its patients with HIV and hepatitis. The Department of Veterans Affairs mailed letters out to 1,812 veterans, warning them they may potentially be infected, because dental equipment "may not have been cleaned correctly" at the clinic at the John Cochran hospital.