Cold weather hair SOS: Your complete guide to winter hydration
The cooler temperatures bring drier weather for those of us in the inland provinces, or wet weather if living in some coastal areas, but both scenarios leave us battling with dry hair.
You need to make sure your hair is hydrated and moisturised, and these tips will see you through the cold months.
UP THE MOISTURE
Your edges and hairline in particular are at even more risk to the harsh winter weather and can become extremely dry.
Cut back on the shampoo that can dry out your hair even more, and rather wash your hair weekly with conditioner.
Your hair and scalp will remain clean and moisturised.
Use a moisturising deep conditioner at least once a week to help repair your hairline and retain moisture, and apply a water-based moisturiser to your hair and hairline twice a day to keep your hair hydrated.
Braid sprays containing glycerine and oil are an easy and excellent choice to keep your hair moist and soft.
Read more | Essential winter care tips for natural hair
ADD OIL
Hair growth tends to slow down during the winter months, so if you're looking to gain a few centimetres, massage natural oils into your hairline for a few minutes twice a day.
Use oils such as castor and coconut around the edges of your hairline to help increase blood flow and keep your hair hydrated.
Castor oil also helps to thicken hair, which is a great help if your hairline is suffering. Adding an oil will also help to seal in the extra moisture you have been applying regularly.
SILK FOR YOUR HAIR
Your cotton pillowcase may feel warm and soft, but it's a nightmare for your hair, especially in winter, as cotton soaks up moisture.
It's best to sleep on a satin or silk pillowcase all year around, but make sure you do this in winter to keep your hair from breaking and losing moisture.
A satin or silk scarf is also an option for evenings. Be careful, too, of loose hair brushing up against cotton jackets and coats as it could cause split ends.
Read more | 4 Essential tips for long-lasting braided styles
LESS MANIPULATION
Constant styling contributes to a weak hairline, and your hair is at its most fragile during the colder season. Avoid this by wearing easier styles such as braids, twists, weaves and wigs. These styles also keep the hair protected from the harsh winter elements.
But never add extensions to a broken hairline as it will add stress, and your hair underneath will still require regular moisture and conditioning.
Always avoid overly tight braiding along your hairline. If you are feeling too much tension, that means your hair is styled too tightly. You may not notice problems straight away, but over time your strands will weaken and break.
Be sure to remove these hairstyles after four to six weeks, and give your hair a break in between.
Don't add to the extreme elements by applying harsh, excessive heat on delicate edges. Always use a heat protectant styling product and turn down the heat on your hairdryer, flat iron or other tools.
This may mean drying your hair will take longer, but there will be less heat damage. However, if your hairline is already damaged, it's best to avoid heat styling.
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According to Tagarro, children with HIV have long been 'left behind' in the race to find a treatment that can put HIV-positive individuals permanently into remission. Since 2007, 10 adults are thought to have been cured, having received stem cell transplants to treat life-threatening blood cancer, a procedure which ended up eliminating the virus. Yet with such procedures being both complex and highly risky—other patients have died in the aftermath of similar attempts—it is not considered a viable strategy for specifically targeting HIV. Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small subpopulation of children then seem able to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone. 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Based on what he's seen so far, he has a number of ideas about what could be happening. In particular, it appears that boys are more likely to better control the virus due to a quirk of gender biology to do with the innate immune system, the body's first-line defense against pathogens. 'The female innate immune system both in utero and in childhood is much more aggressive than the male equivalent when it encounters and senses viruses like HIV,' says Goulder. 'Usually that's a good thing, but because HIV infects activated immune cells, it actually seems to make girls more vulnerable to being infected.' In addition, Goulder notes that because female fetuses share the same innate immune system as their mothers, the virus transmitted to them is an HIV strain that has become resistant to the female innate immune response. There could also be other explanations for the long-lasting suppression seen in some children. In some cases, Goulder has observed that the transmitted strain of HIV has been weakened through needing to undergo changes to circumvent the mother's adaptive immune response, the part of the immune system which learns to target specific viruses and other pathogens. He has also noted that male infants experience particularly large surges of testosterone in the first six months of life—a period known as 'mini-puberty'—which can enhance their immune system in various ways that help them fight the virus. Such revelations are particularly tantalizing as HIV researchers are starting to get access to a far more potent toolbox of therapeutics. Leading the way are so-called bNAbs, or broadly neutralizing antibodies, which have the ability to recognize and fight many different strains of HIV, as well as stimulating the immune system to destroy cells where HIV is hiding. There are also a growing number of therapeutic vaccines in development that can train the immune system's T cells to target and destroy HIV reservoirs. Children tend to respond to various vaccines better than adults, and Goulder says that if some children are already proving relatively adept at controlling the virus on the back of standard antiretrovirals, these additional therapeutics could give them the additional assistance they need to eradicate HIV altogether. In the coming years, this is set to be tested in several clinical trials. Cotton is leading the most ambitious attempt, which will see HIV-infected children receive a combination of antiretroviral therapy, three bNAbs, and a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, while in a separate trial, Goulder is examining the potential of a different bNAb together with antiretrovirals to see whether it can help more children achieve long-term remission. 'We think that adding the effects of these broadly neutralizing antibodies to antiretrovirals will help us chip away at what is needed to achieve a cure,' says Goulder. 'It's a little bit like with leukemia, where treatments have steadily improved, and now the outlook for most children affected is incredibly good. Realistically in most cases, curing HIV probably requires a few hits from different angles, impacting the way that the virus can grow, and tackling it with different immune responses at the same time to essentially force it into a cul-de-sac that it can't escape from.' Children are also being viewed as the ideal target population for an even more ambitious experimental treatment, a one-time gene therapy that delivers instructions directing the body's own muscle cells to produce a continuous stream of bNAbs, without the need for repeated infusions. Maurico Martins, an associate professor at the University of Florida, who is pioneering this new approach, feels that it could represent a particularly practical strategy for low-income countries where HIV transmission to children is particularly rife, and mothers often struggle to keep their children on repeated medication. 'In regions like Uganda or parts of South Africa where this is very prevalent, you could also give this therapy to a baby right after birth as a preventative measure, protecting the newborn child against acquisition of HIV through breastfeeding and maybe even through sexual intercourse later in life,' says Martins. While Martins also hopes that gene therapy could benefit HIV-infected adults in future, he feels it has more of a chance of initially succeeding in children because their nascent immune systems are less likely to launch what he calls an anti-drug response that can destroy the therapeutic bNAbs. 'It's very difficult for most antibodies to recognize the HIV envelope protein because it's buried deep within a sugar coat,' says Martins. 'To overcome that, these bNAbs carry a lot of mutations and extensions to their arms which allow them to penetrate that sugar coat. But the problem then is that they're often viewed by your own immune system as foreign, and it starts making these anti-bNAb antibodies.' But when Martins tested the therapy in newborn rhesus macaques, it was far more effective. 'We found that the first few days or two weeks after birth comprised a sort of sweet spot for this gene therapy,' he says. 'And that's why this could really work very well in treating and preventing pediatric HIV infections.' Like many HIV scientists, Martins has run into recent funding challenges, with a previous commitment from the National Institutes of Health to support a clinical trial of the novel therapy in HIV-infected children being withdrawn. However, he is hoping that the trial will still go ahead. 'We're now talking with the Gates Foundation to see whether they can sponsor it,' he says. While children still comprise the minority of overall HIV infections, being able to cure them may yield further insights that help with the wider goal of an overall curative therapy. 'We can learn a lot from them because they are different,' says Goulder. 'I think we can learn how to achieve a cure in kids if we continue along this pathway, and from there, that will have applications in adults as well.'
