Now that over 40 million people are taking Prozac and similar medication to cheer themselves up, we learn that they may as well be taking sugar-pills. Waving the Freedom of Information act as a warrant to gain access to data drug companies haven’t wanted to publish, researchers looked again at whether people popping Prozac actually [...]
So Italian researchers have looked at just 20 women, and found the G-spot. This has excited comment in the UK, though not much elsewhere. The Guardian’s (rather good) weekly science podcast, wonders at the fact that women can have more than one type of orgasm. Or rather, two male commentators wonder. If they’d asked a [...]
A new study in the UK inidcates that doctors aren’t doing very well at diagnosing HIV. The study looks at diagnosis in primary infection, the few weeks or months when a person first becomes infected with HIV, when the virus replicates like mad and people often feel fluey. It’s an important time to catch infection, [...]
A week ago, the outgoing executive director of the US’s National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Matt Foreman made a great speech in which he called for proper equality for all Americans, regardless of who they sleep with. He also said this: “Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men [...]
I’m aware that my ambivalent attitude towards tracing the sex partners of HIV-infected people in order to offer them testing, prevention services and treatment if necessary is unpopular in some quarters. When I look at what the Egyptian government is up to, I can really see why. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, [...]
I’ve been taken to task for not weighing in on the kerfuffle about whether people on ARVs can pass on HIV. In case you haven’t been following the debate, the Swiss AIDS Commission has reviewed studies of couples where one partner has HIV and the other doesn’t, and has looked at HIV transmission with and [...]
As citizens of a country founded on the slogan “No taxation without representation”, Americans living overseas get to pay taxes without any dedicated representation in Congress. But they do get to vote in primaries. The Democrats make it easier than the Republicans , even providing helpful on-the-spot voting sites in pubs in Dublin and donut [...]
The British Medical Journal has been running a little debate on condoms: are they the answer to rising rates of sexually transmitted infections? “Yes but” (we also need other approaches), says one side. “No therefore” (we also need other approaches), says the other. Bald men fighting over a comb. Both sides achieve the almost unachieveable: [...]
Some good news for drug injectors in the US: a nasal spray that costs less than US$ 10 can reverse the effect of an opiate overdose . Some even better news: programmes giving out these sprays have sprung up across the country. A programme on National Public Radio reports that these kits, which put drug [...]
So if you give antiretrovirals to humanised mice (don’t ask) and then slosh their vaginas full of HIV, they don’t get infected, according to a new study from Paul Denton and colleagues at the University of Texas. None of the five mice treated with a combination of emtricitabine and tenofovir got infected, whereas 7 out [...]
Last week, Annals of Internal Medicine published an important paper on drug-resistant MRSA, a bug often spread in hospitals but in this case circulating in the population. Binh An Diep and colleagues report that gay men are 13 times more likely to have this strain of MRSA than other people. MRSA can manifest itself in [...]
Europe is baring all this winter, with major exhibitions of erotica in both London and Paris. But London has a side show more explicit than anything the French dare to show. Artist Jordan McKenzie masturbates over paper. Having seeded his artwork, he fertilises it with carbon powder, creating dashing artworks. These great works have inspired [...]
I have been greatly seduced by The MidWest Teen Sex Show. Its monthly podcasts aim to inform teenagers about the ins and outs of sex. Their audience must include thousands of teenagers who have been keep in Three Monkeys ignorance by the Bush administration’s “abstinence only” programmes — programmes which I note have been generously [...]
In an eminently sensible editorial, Daniel Halperin recently argued that the vast resources available for AIDS in the developing world, and especially in Africa, are threatening to crush other important priorities such as basic sanitation. This has prompted a prickly response from the Global AIDS Alliance. Somewhat predictably, the Global AIDS Alliance argues that we [...]
US Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is refusing to suck back comments made in 1992 about isolating people with HIV, according to an AP report reprinted in the IHT. Web sites are buzzing with outrage: Huckabee wants to quarantine people with HIV. Shame! Despite his own, rather incompetent efforts to defend himself from that assertion on [...]
An all-time favourite, this French ad reminds us that there are all sorts of good reasons to use condoms.
In his “Open letter to epidemiologists and surveillance experts” Tim France looks at falling HIV prevalence rates in Zimbabwe and asks an important question: is lower HIV prevalence always a good thing? He points out several situations where HIV prevalence could be expected to rise, for “good” reasons. Obviously, the longer people survive with HIV, [...]
Here’s one of my all-time favourite condom ads, for Kenya’s Trust brand. Hats off to the American taxpayer for funding this ad, and the very affordable and (in my experience) not bad quality Trust condoms it promotes.
One in 30 adults in Washington DC is infected with HIV, and that’s just the people we know about. That puts the capital of the United States on a par with Congo, Ethiopia and Angola. Why these scandalously high rates, over 9 times the national average? The report (pdf file, 139 pages) from the Washington [...]
