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 [...]
You don’t need to speak Spanish to get the message of this “AIDS awareness” ad.
Will this sort of generalised pap make you use a condom the next time you get lucky with someone you don’t know too well? Perhaps. And perhaps it will stop you smoking or overeating — it’s that specific.
Thanks to Juan [...]
Our genes are amazing. They win battles for us against some pathogens (malaria), but their victories can leave us exposed to others (HIV). That’s the lesson from a fascinating paper published recently in Cell and Host Microbe.
Researchers looking at data from a large group of American servicemen have found that a genetic mutation which made [...]
Though I’ve been wrestling the dreaded PowerPoint more than I’d like to recently, I haven’t posted for a while on data presentation. So I’m stealing this absolute gem that Environmental Graffiti ran under the title “World’s most expensive place to have sex” and Presentation Zen relayed under the title “When bar charts go bad”.
What I [...]
Bush may be quacking around with a limp, but the fundamentalists that support him are squeezing all they can out of these last, lame-duck months. For me, the first sign that US Christians were prepared to terrorise people into dropping contraception was this poster in the Tanzanian capital Dar Es Salaam. But it now looks [...]
Before AIDS, the sexually active teen’s STD joke-of-choice was “What’s the difference between love and herpes?” The answer, of course, was that herpes was for ever. And so it was, although antiviral therapy, acyclovir in particular, has proven quite good at suppressing it and at reducing outbreaks which often lead to genital ulcers. But those, [...]
The Bronx, a borough of New York that is home to 1.3 million people, has decided that it is going to try to test all adults for HIV over the next three years, according to The New York Times.
The NYT story elicited this comment from a friend of mine, a journalist who is much more [...]
Earlier this month, the head of HIV programming at WHO told a journalist that HIV was not going to storm through the heterosexual populations of any continent outside Africa. And he was right. But days later, he issued a hasty and non-sensical “correction”. The correction made it politically correct, but epidemiologically incorrect. I got in [...]
I’m privileged to be visiting the Nation’s Capital. Washington’s abuzz with pre-election politics, of course. But it’s motoring along in all sorts of other ways, too. Today, the Washington Post reported that the city has somehow just zoned out over half of the AIDS deaths in the city. HIV surveillance has never been particularly good [...]
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