Because I run a course to help mid-career scientists get their papers published in peer-reviewed journals, I’m always on the look-out for really good papers, and for really bad ones. I also keep my eyes open for bad science reporting. It’s depressingly easy to find the latter, but it just got easier. Tom Scott has [...]
The New York Times is a bit of a supertanker; it takes a while to get going on a subject. So by the time they run a drum-rolling front page story about some world-changing trend, you can be pretty sure that the trend is close to becoming the new status quo. I’m hoping that’s true [...]
I have a confession. Behind all the sex and drugs talk, I’m just a giant data nerd. I believe that health research data collected with taxpayers’ money should be used to improve lives, not just to improve the career of a couple of scientists who got the research grant. And we’d improve lives faster if [...]
So gay guys go on having unprotected sex after they are diagnosed with HIV, a new descriptive study of gay poz guys at a clinic in Boston tells us. Nothing new there, although it’s sobering to be reminded that one in two of the men who know they have HIV choose to bareback with someone [...]
I was lucky enough to go to the TED conference in California last month. Many of the better talks are already on line. My own favourite was Sam Harris on the subject of science and morality. I may have liked it because it was squeezed in that stomach-churning moment between my breakfast with local cops [...]
Last Friday, I went to a deeply depressing “is feminism dead” type discussion. The normally male bastion of Prospect Magazine rang with the sound of high heels, and… Oh, wait, most of the people there were feminists. Scratch the high heels, then. Yes, yes, I’m playing to completely unjustified sterotypes. Except that they are not [...]
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 [...]
Remember the fabulous singing Nobel prize winner? Now PCR ads are getting sexy again. Though I do have to wonder how may pints the founders of TwistDx had had when they registered their company name. Try saying it out loud even before a pint… Thanks to Seif, who has yet to take me shoe shopping…
How ethical are HIV prevention trials? Every time we announce results of a trial that compares new HIV infections in a group with or without some new intervention (a microbicide for example, or a vaccine), some journalist or other jumps on the fact that researchers are just watching people get infected. Researchers then explain that [...]
Not wanting to be always the purveyor of bad news, I was looking forward to today’s results from the Pro2000 microbicide studies. After hopeful results in an earlier trial, I’d convinced myself the gel would prevent HIV.
Finally, some common sense in HIV testing policy in the US. Although you’d be hard pressed to know it from some of the coverage. Until last Monday, America’s unfathomably illogical health service for the properly poor, Medicaid, refused to pay for HIV testing just as it refuses to pay for all sorts of other screening [...]
At breakfast in Bangalore this morning, I was greeted by news of Bollywood’s first on-screen gay kiss. When they’re puckerd up like this, wouldn’t you want to? But the Indian censors may not share my enthusiasm. I am Omar will be screening at the Rotterdam film festival. Check it out and see if the kiss [...]
As promised, a note on the UK’s latest data on HIV among drug injectors. Some of the US’s battalions of Drug Warriors have been crowing that the new figures show a rise in infection rates among junkies in the UK: clear evidence that the nation’s policy of making sterile needles and injecting equipment available to [...]
Yesterday the US finally dropped its absolutely senseless law forbidding people with HIV from visiting the Land of the Free. (While Saint Obama is getting patted on the back for ending the ban, he was actually signing off on something that George Bush put in motion last year). That’s unmitigated good news for people with [...]
A month ago, the media got very excited about an HIV vaccine. Study results, released in Thailand with a maximum of fuss and a minimum of detail, showed that the two-step vaccine might protect about a third of the people who get the shots against HIV. Then the doom-mongers weighed in: without more information, we [...]
How excited should we be about the results of the HIV vaccine trial in Thailand? I argued in The Times today that the results are the worst type of good news. The combination vaccine is good enough to raise real hopes that we can find something that works. After the gloom of last year, that’s [...]
It’s usually safe to take time off in July to move house — in a previous existence in the newroom we used to call the European summer the “silly season”. In the weeks I’ve been painting walls, unpacking boxes and not blogging, we’ve had some HIV silliness, but some good sense too. The IAS conference [...]
For a larger version, visit Jorge Cham at PhD comics. It’s worth it. Especially if you are killing time not finishing your thesis (Sara…) This comic came to me by way of Laura (thanks) and Language Log, where the true nerds among you can go for an illuminating discussion of the difference between ρ and [...]
Further to yesterday’s post, stats-are-fun superstar Hans Rosling has calculated a coverage-per-death ratio for swine flu and TB. It clearly points to an under-reporting of the boring old pandemics that we’ve grown used to ignoring. But it also begs the question that plagues prevention efforts in health as well as in other areas — terrorism, [...]
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 [...]
