So another World AIDS Day (and this blog’s second birthday) has come and gone. We learned that 2.7 million mothers, lovers, children, school teachers, preachers, husbands and friends became infected with a rather fragile and still potentially fatal virus last year. Each of those prevention failures cost taxpayers about US$ 3,000. Since we’ve known how [...]
To mark the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, and the 1st anniversary of The Wisdom of Whores, I offer a post stolen wholesale from Michael Buehler. ‘It is actually not HIV that kills us but the hospital administration’, says an Indonesian woman with HIV. Oh, and corruption in the Ministry of Health, complacent self-satisfaction [...]
So Asia is awash with fake pills. No news there. Cops are seizing a fair few of them — 16 million in the last few months, worth US$ 6.6 million, according to Interpol. That’s a step forward. But that some of them seem to be antiretroviral drugs for HIV threatens two steps back.
The first step [...]
Malawian civil servants who are not infected with HIV are claiming to be positive to increase their salaries, thus demonstrating that the monster of stigma can be slain with cash.
Malawi is suspending its payments to HIV-infected civil servants because so many uninfected people are trying to cash in, according to AFP (via Cryton Chikoko). A [...]
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 TASO, [...]
The British HIV Association has issued new guildlines for HIV testing . (pdf) They are very nearly extremely sensible. But…
One in five of the people newly diagnosed with HIV in the UK last year were diagnosed with AIDS at the same time. That means they’d probably been walking around with HIV infection for eight or [...]
As competition to treat people for HIV has hotted up, pharmaceutical companies have started dumping on one another. Using innuendo and not-quite-stated factoids, they are beginning to imply that the rival camp has something to hide (something they’ve no doubt learned from political campaigns). Those other drugs are toxic, discolouring, inconvenient. Activist groups and [...]
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 [...]
Last week, Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche said it was giving up on HIV-related research. I expected some cynical “told you so” comments from industry analysts, but the reaction to the announcement was surprisingly muted. Even AIDS activists were mousy.
Activists have done a spectacular job in slapping down the price of antiretroviral drugs in the last [...]
The bill allowing another US$ 50 billion of US taxpayer’s cash to be spent on HIV in developing countries has finally been given the thumbs up by the Senate. There’s good and bad drafted on to the PEPFAR legislation. The good is the dropping of a law which forbids foreigners with HIV from sullying the [...]
