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 rude [...]
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 [...]
