I’m not easily shocked. Really. But I have to say that the hairs rose on the back on my neck when I saw this:
A catholic NGO, calling itself Human Life International, has put up three of these billboards in Tanzania. It’s president, Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, crows about this achievement on a Catholic web site, [...]
A while back, I posted a link to BioRad’s unlikely but delightful PCR test anthem, “When you need to know who Daddy is”.
Those tests are strictly for lab nerds. More recently, though, supermarkets have started stocking do it yourself paternity tests. It wasn’t ever going to be long before enthusiastic you-tubers had a go [...]
Needle exchange usually gets a pretty bad press. So I was surprised, as I wandered by accident into the greenosphere today, to find that harm reduction models could save the world.
Colin Beavan draws a parallel between injectors and consumers. You can’t break an addiction to consumer goods any more easily than you can break [...]
Some readers may have had yesterday’s literary post zoned out by the language police. By happy coincidence, Blog Around the Clock drew my attention to the cuss-o-meter, and I ran The Wisdom through it. Just 16.6% of my posts are grubby, which shows there’s lot more science than sex on this blog. I [...]
Working with HIV can get dispiriting at times. We have some 70 million prevention failures to our credit so far; those will always attract more attention than the unquantifiable millions of infections which we have managed to prevent, by providing a safe blood supply, clean needles for injectors, decent STI treatment and condoms for people [...]
London’s a great city to walk around; reading an anthology of London poetry before embarking on another epic city walk, I came across a couple of gems from the Scottish poet William Dunbar. Here’s Dunbar’s description of courtship, in a modern translation:
“His pretty beard was combed and trimmed, but it was spattered with broth, and [...]
Between the downfall of New York governor Elliot Spitzer and the renewed debates about whether the US should use PEPFAR money to strong-arm opposition to prostitution, we’ve been buzzing a bit lately about the conflation of the sex indsutry and human trafficking.
A Crime So Monstrous, a new book by Benjamin Skinner, is adding to [...]
As the US tabloids trawl New Yorks’s cleavages for signs of Spitzer, I offer this cheat sheet from Matt Bors. (Click to enlarge.)
If I had Matt’s graphic talents, I’d want to do one for politicians in other countries, too. Because let’s face it, there are whole categories missing that are of prime importance to parliamentarians [...]
I’m not a regular reader of the Mission News Network, but I couldn’t help snapping to attention when they re-drew the global HIV map: “Parts of the former Soviet Union are starting to see infection rates surpassing those of Africa,” they declared, singling out Ukraine. Last time I looked, around 1.4% of adults in Ukraine [...]
In the prologue to my soon-to-be-published book The Wisdom of Whores, I give an example of the different ways nerds like me look at cause and effect in health. When I was writing it, I made up an example out of the air — something that I thought that people would relate to and be [...]
