Many people, including the head of the WHO’s HIV division Kevin de Cock, have observed that “we can’t treat our way out of this epidemic”. Today, The Lancet publishes a paper by many people, including the head of the WHO’s HIV division Kevin de Cock, claiming that we can, in fact, treat our way out [...]
Two wrongs don’t make a right. And Papua’s “plan” to implant HIV positive people with microchips is definitely wrong. As the Jakarta Post pointed out yesterday (in a profile that called me a “raging dinosaur” — a compliment, I think) I was wrong to dismiss Indonesia’s “anti-pornography” bill as so silly it would never get [...]
Tuesday evening. I spent it with baited breath sitting at the bar in Baltimore airport, surrounded by boys with buzz-cuts and camouflage who were headed for Iraq. They seemed strangely unconcerned by the drama that was unfolding in red and blue on the screens in front of us. I, for my part, nearly missed my [...]
I don’t usually mind being wrong. Really I don’t. But today it hurts. Indonesia has passed a bill that makes it illegal to bathe in rivers or wiggle your hips while dancing. The news reached me at exactly the time I was on air on one of the country highest rated TV shows, talking about [...]
Christian fundamentalism and HIV seem both to be on the upswing in Uganda. I’ve remarked before that enthusiastic support for abstinence-only programmes has undermined previously successful HIV prevention efforts in the country. But now it seems over-zealous preachers are threatening the success of treatment efforts, too. Robert Ochai, director of the trailblazing AIDS support organisation [...]
HIV research nerds like myself collect information from people at risk because we want to make things better for those people (by providing better prevention services, e.g.), not because we want to make things worse. But what happens when that information gets used as a weapon against the very people we want to help? It’s [...]
The Daily Christian proposes that you Earn Your Right to Wear White. You can do it for just US$ 8.99. This next-to-nothing knickers are sure to ward off over-enthusiastic boyfriends with their trenchant message: I’m wondering whether the Daily Christian’s aestehtics might achieve what their messages don’t. They suggest you “Size up for a looser [...]
Bush may be quacking around with a limp, but the fundamentalists that support him are squeezing all they can out of these last, lame-duck months. For me, the first sign that US Christians were prepared to terrorise people into dropping contraception was this poster in the Tanzanian capital Dar Es Salaam. But it now looks [...]
If you live your life among people whose lives, jobs or natural curiousity open their minds to the world, it is easy to forget how rigid some people are in their views. Today, I was sent a shocking reminder of the vitriol that comes with a small mind; it made me understand why some of [...]
The PEPFAR authorisation circus drags on. Senate leader Harry Reid is trying to force a vote on the bill. A handful of stubborn Republicans continue to stamp their feet about it. One of their worries is “mission creep” — PEPFAR money might be used to do things that are not 100% related to showing America’s [...]
One of the things I noticed on the left hand side of the Atlantic was how many people took the dust jacket off my book before taking it out in public. No one wants to be seen in the company of “Whores” on the subway. But who is the word offending? Both left and right, [...]
Apparently not willing or able to think for themselves, Christian fundamentalists have been programming their computers to automate their views. The result: content that they themselves would probably consider pornographic. This, for example: “Homosexual dominated the competition. He started well and pulled out to a comfortable lead by the 40-meter mark. This time, he kept [...]
We don’t have many success stories in HIV prevention. And it seems like the Bush government is determined to undermine the ones we do have. Cambodia and Uganda, both shining examples of success in HIV prevention, are being squashed into failure by ideologues who would rather see people die than help sex workers and young [...]
The Bronx, a borough of New York that is home to 1.3 million people, has decided that it is going to try to test all adults for HIV over the next three years, according to
I’m sure many readers are aware that there’s been a bit of a debate lately about spending on AIDS in the developing world. Is AIDS crowding out other infectious diseases, other health issues, other development issues? Or has the AIDS epidemic focused attention on the woeful neglect of health in developing countries, and will it [...]
Earlier this month, the head of HIV programming at WHO told a journalist that HIV was not going to storm through the heterosexual populations of any continent outside Africa. And he was right. But days later, he issued a hasty and non-sensical “correction”. The correction made it politically correct, but epidemiologically incorrect. I got in [...]
Further to yesterday’s post, I find myself in California at a happy time. Same-sex marriages are a huge step forward in undermining the absurd qualms that our society still has about who has sex with whom. I notice that the qualms are still reflected, though, in reports of the happy day. My New York Times [...]
I was pleased to read of the marriage of Bishop Gene Robinson and his partner of 20 years Mark Andrew. Well, not marriage actually, but civil union, the closest we allow gay men and women to get to the sacrament in most States in the US. Bishop Robinson is Episcopalian (which is pretty High Church [...]
In a comment on an earlier post, Roger Tatoud drew my attention to a story about high HIV levels in Uganda’s army being a threat to national security. Some would say that means Uganda’s First Lady is a threat to national security; her enthusiastic embrace of abstinence as the main weapon against HIV is thought [...]
The results of the 2007 round of risk surveillance among US high-school kids are out. They find, wait for it, that despite nearly a decade of being told to cross their legs, American teenagers still have sex! The proportion of teenagers having sex drifted downward for the first decade it was measured (the surveys started [...]
