Illustration by Fernando Vicente This week, the Great and the Good of the AIDS industry gather in Vienna for the biennial AIDS circus. With delicious irony, the conference, held right next to the barracks of the UN’s Drug Warriors, will focus in part on getting more countries to do the one thing that really works [...]
Meena Saraswathi Seshu was a well-to-do Indian do-gooder who was determined to save India’s sex slaves from their evil traffickers. To her immense credit, illustrated in this nice profile in The Lancet, (pdf here), she changed her mind when she learned the facts. Not so the US Congressman who tried to bully her organisation SANGRAM [...]
I’ve been taken to task for posting TED talks from the UK’s new Fearless Leader, and neglecting to post my own. Here it is, if you have 18 minutes to spare. If you’ve only got four minutes, I would also thoroughly recommend spending it with comedian Julia Sweeney, as she has the “sex talk” with [...]
I’m in Chicago for the month of April, just as the Illinois state Senate tries to increase the penalties for buying and selling sex. The bill (which passed the House unanimously last month) will make it a felony to buy sex, so that any vet, doctor, lawyer etc convicted of the crime will lose their [...]
Can we treat our way out of the HIV epidemic? Yesterday I wrote a piece in The Guardian suggesting that the “Test and Treat” approach was a triumph of optinism over common sense. Today, I am a homophobe, a media slut, a cherry-picker of data and over 120 other things, mostly nasty. My favourite, gloriously [...]
So Jacob Zuma is sorry about having unprotected sex with someone three decades younger than himself, who is not one of the five women he’s married. That’s a little better than last week’s “You should be proud that I’ve admitted paternity and paid a fine. What are you all so uptight about?” HIV activists are [...]
I’ve been roused from my long summer torpor by a row over a German ad that tries to make Hitler the face of AIDS. Predictably enough, activist groups immediately yelled “stigma”! What we should be yelling is “dinosaurs!”. In Western Europe, AIDS is no longer the “mass murderer” the ad claims. In fact, it is [...]
Off-topic but on memory: 20 years ago today I was in Tiananmen Square, reporting for Reuters on the chaos that was the student movement. It was an odd time — sweaty, rank-smelling but rather jolly. Erica’s photo captures rather well the unbridled hubris and optimism of the students, right up to the last day or [...]
Earlier this week, I gave a talk in Norway called “Panic in Perspective: Science, Media and the Creation of Pandemics”. I chose the title months ago, and had no idea how topical it would turn out to be. The downside was that instead of exploring the beauty of Bergen in a kayak, I had to [...]
I, like many who’ve written to me, am speechless with rage at the Pope’s first direct pronoucement on condoms. (Well, not quite speechless. I had a little vent about it in today’s Times.) To oppose condoms on dogmatic grounds is one thing. That’s the Pope’s job, if he considers it his job to defend Catholic [...]
I’ve always been a big believer in the overlap between art and science. We’re seeing more of it these days — the idea of testing whole populations for HIV and sticking everyone who is infected on antiretrovirals as a way of putting a stop to the HIV epidemic has been dubbed Pop-ART, for example. I’m [...]
Halleluliah! We’ve finally got something to be happy about in HIV prevention — a microbicide that cuts the risk of HIV infection by a third. You’d think everyone would be shouting for joy. But no, we’re bending over backwards to say we’re not sure it works. The product in question is Pro2000 gel, and the [...]
Public health types are always agonising about oral sex. Should we say it’s dangerous or not? Now, Swedish researchers have shown that lots of oral sex with an HIV-infected partner may actually be protective against the virus. The study, published in the (expensive, subscription only) AIDS journal and helpfully summarised by Aidsmap suggests that men [...]
Christmas is about the Virgin Birth. For those of us not lucky enough to have been blessed by the Angel of the Lord and wanting a second chance, there’s the artificial hymen. A bargain at just US$14.99 (or Suggest Your Price). The product has so many advantages. It comes in discreet packaging — “Your Mum [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Since the Swiss noted that people who take their meds correctly and don’t have other infections are unlikely to pass on HIV, the public health establishment has been in a tizz over how to react. Predictably enough, Australian researchers have done what epidemiologists with a point to make so often do: — they’ve reached for [...]
I’ve been known to take the piss out of scientists who think people make decisions about sex the way they make decisions about what stocks to invest in, nice and rationally. My published references even include “Sex is fun, remember?”. In my experience, a hard-on (or its female equivalent, a wide-on) tends to disrupt rational [...]
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 week I posted the patented Wisdom of Whores Automatic Proposal Generator (TM) to help you all shake millions out of the Global Fund. But today I found a tool thats is genuinely useful from the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation They’ve put together a fanatstic, really simple tool that allows you to generate charts of [...]
