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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Even in Texas, I thought when I first saw this story, there cannot be 12 people this ignorant. I thought it a bad joke, not worth mentioning here. But apparently it is true: a Texan jury convicted an HIV positive man for assault with a deadly weapon: his saliva. I reproduce the Associated Press story [...]
I’ve written before about America’s nonsensical ban on HIV-positive immigrants — a provision which puts the States in the illustrious company of such shining protectors of human rights as Libya and Iraq. Andrew Sullivan, a stalwart of the US political bloggosphere and an HIV-positive not-quite-immigrant, raises the issue again in an editorial in the Washington [...]
A great deal has already been written about the death, perhaps suicide, of Deborah Jane Palfrey, aka the DC Madam. Ms. Palfrey was convicted two weeks ago of running a prostitution ring that met the needs and desires of honchos in Washington. A couple of the honchos involved lost their jobs as a result of [...]
The Wisdom of Whores isn’t published until next week, but one of the more absurd predictions in the book has come to pass. Here’s the passage from the book. Chatting with my friend Bert who works for the World Bank, I marvelled that almost every UN agency was on the AIDS bandwagon. Bert gave me [...]
Today, apparently, is “Rethinking AIDS Day”. Or so we’re told by a group of AIDS denialists who gather under the banner of RethinkingAIDS.com. They and their mates have a channel on Youtube, too, called HIVquestions. They’ve been inviting me to sign up since I posted a video explaining that in some countries, counterintuitively enough, more [...]
As parliamentarians start to interfere with the size of our wine glasses, Brits are whining that the Nanny state is getting too big for its boots. Why should the state tell us what to eat, how much to drink, how to have sex? Because to save us from ourselves, say some. To save us from [...]
Policies on AIDS, recreational drugs and a warming world are struggling their way through Congress at the moment; they always seem to emerge slimmer on the science once they’ve made it through the endless committees, discussions and debates. If you’re in the New York area, you might pick up some tips on why from this [...]
A new type of terrorism is stalking the United States. Development agencies are so scared of being accused of promoting abortion that they’re trying to make the very word invisible, even in a data-based used only by academics and other nerds. USAID employees trawling POPLINE, a database used by demographers and researchers in reproductive health, [...]
