Archive for the ‘Ideology and HIV’ Category

Fire, brimstone and AIDS activists (25/06/08)

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 [...]

The correction of the correction is correct (21/06/08)

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 [...]

So many ways to be gay (19/06/08)

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 [...]

Congratulations to the Bishop and his husband (11/06/08)

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 [...]

Recognising HIV in Uganda’s army (not) (08/06/08)

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 by [...]

Shocking news from the US: teens have sex! (05/06/08)

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 in [...]

A billion dollars: not enough for gay men in Uganda (03/06/08)

The head of Uganda’s AIDS commission says his country can’t afford to do any HIV prevention work with gay men, according to the Pink News. Though they’ve got hundreds of millions in the AIDS funding trough, and have their snouts raised for more.
“Gays are one of the drivers of HIV in Uganda, but because of [...]

Abstaining from common sense in Uganda? (27/05/08)

The First Lady of Uganda, Janet Museveni, thinks that increasing access to HIV treatment is making Ugandans more promiscuous, according to a story in Sunday’s The New Vision. We’ve certainly seen evidence of that in rich countries, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason it wouldn’t be the same in poorer parts of the [...]

Treatment is prevention. And black is white (20/05/08)

Two of the Republican senators accused of holding to ransom some US$ 50 billion in US funding for HIV in Africa are fighting back. They are also ill-educated, badly confused, or lying through their teeth.
After a Washington Post editorial accused them of foot-dragging on AIDS funding in part because they worried that money might be [...]

Balls to purity, this is therapy for Dads (19/05/08)

What teenage girl would want to be “covered” by her father in areas of purity? Plenty, it seems, if the ongoing success of the Purity Balls is anything to go by. At these balls, fathers pay over US$100 to crow over their daughters’ virginity, pledging publicly to maintain it until they hand them over to [...]

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