Archive for the tag "AIDS"

Fire, brimstone and AIDS activists (25/06/08)

I’m sure many readers are aware that there’s been a bit of a debate lately about spending on AIDS in the developing world. Is AIDS crowding out other infectious diseases, other health issues, other development issues? Or has the AIDS epidemic focused attention on the woeful neglect of health in developing countries, and will it [...]

Life after AIDS? Not quite yet (10/06/08)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article in Prospect about HIV prevention among gay men now that near-universal access to treatment is making AIDS virtually invisible in rich countries. This excited a fair bit of comment over at Metafilter, not all of it pretty. But in any case, I was premature in declaring [...]

Revelation, beat-up or “I told you so” moment? (09/06/08)

The WHO has declared an end to heterosexual AIDS outside of Africa, according to Jeremy Laurance, writing in The Independent.
Laurance quotes Kevin de Cock, a thoughtful and honest scientist who happens also to head up WHO’s HIV division, as saying “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries [outside Africa]. [...]

Global warming causes HIV (30/04/08)

The Wisdom of Whores isn’t published until next week, but one of the more absurd predictions in the book has come to pass.
Here’s the passage from the book.
Chatting with my friend Bert who works for the World Bank, I marvelled that almost every UN agency was on the AIDS bandwagon. Bert gave me a “Well [...]

Rethinking Rethinking AIDS Day (23/04/08)

Today, apparently, is “Rethinking AIDS Day”. Or so we’re told by a group of AIDS denialists who gather under the banner of RethinkingAIDS.com. They and their mates have a channel on Youtube, too, called HIVquestions. They’ve been inviting me to sign up since I posted a video explaining that in some countries, counterintuitively enough, more [...]

More sex equals less HIV: I explain why (16/04/08)

This video, not to be taken tooooo seriously (though the science is spot on), is the product of a rainy afternoon with the incomparable Candy Gourlay. Check out Candy’s wit, wisdom and illustration at Notes From the Slushpile

Kenya gets out the scalpel, circumcising men to prevent HIV (12/04/08)

Kenya plans to offer all men the snip, in an effort to reduce HIV transmission. It’s a brave move in a country when circumcision status is a badge of ethnicity and differences in ethnicity are reason enough for rioting, looting and murder.
According to a report in The Nation Kenya’s Ministry of Health has published [...]

Saving souls not lives: missionaries in Ukraine (28/03/08)

I’m not a regular reader of the Mission News Network, but I couldn’t help snapping to attention when they re-drew the global HIV map: “Parts of the former Soviet Union are starting to see infection rates surpassing those of Africa,” they declared, singling out Ukraine. Last time I looked, around 1.4% of adults in Ukraine [...]

Stating the obvious department: HIV kills voters (20/03/08)

Three years of research, 400 pages of text, a 52-page introduction, and we learn that politicians and other voters are dying from HIV in Africa.
The Institute for Democracy in South Africa has recently published a massive tome, The Political Cost of AIDS in Africa which “reveals that the fledgling multi-party democracies in parts of the [...]

HIV spreads in those slutty phases: new evidence from a UK study (19/03/08)

In a fascinating new paper published in the wonderful, open-access Public Library of Science, Fraser Lewis and colleagues shed a little more light on how HIV spreads. They show that, at least among gay men in the UK, HIV propels itself in bursts, exploding quickly through a whole cluster of people and then tailing [...]

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