The very first post on this blog, on World AIDS Day 2007, compared HIV rates in the US capital with those in Ethiopia, Congo and Angola. Now the city has issued another excellent report on HIV, and people are begining to wake up to the disgrace (bloggers comment here and here and here and here).
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I’ve always been a big believer in the overlap between art and science. We’re seeing more of it these days — the idea of testing whole populations for HIV and sticking everyone who is infected on antiretrovirals as a way of putting a stop to the HIV epidemic has been dubbed Pop-ART, for example. I’m [...]
Halleluliah! We’ve finally got something to be happy about in HIV prevention — a microbicide that cuts the risk of HIV infection by a third. You’d think everyone would be shouting for joy. But no, we’re bending over backwards to say we’re not sure it works.
The product in question is Pro2000 gel, and the results [...]
Stories of kids smoking antiretroviral drugs to get high first surfaced in South Africa last spring. Picked up by the BBC last week, they are now burning through the WTF pages of the blogosphere. Should we give a damn?
Interestingly, I can’t find anything anywhere from anyone who has actually nicked the pills off their [...]
To mark the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, and the 1st anniversary of The Wisdom of Whores, I offer a post stolen wholesale from Michael Buehler. ‘It is actually not HIV that kills us but the hospital administration’, says an Indonesian woman with HIV. Oh, and corruption in the Ministry of Health, complacent self-satisfaction [...]
Many people, including the head of the WHO’s HIV division Kevin de Cock, have observed that “we can’t treat our way out of this epidemic”. Today, The Lancet publishes a paper by many people, including the head of the WHO’s HIV division Kevin de Cock, claiming that we can, in fact, treat our way out [...]
When I’m asked: What’s the next big thing in HIV prevention? I usually put Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis somewhere high on the list. We don’t yet know if giving out expensive drugs so that people can have unprotected sex without worrying about HIV will work. But I usually ask people to imagine the headlines in The Daily [...]
So Asia is awash with fake pills. No news there. Cops are seizing a fair few of them — 16 million in the last few months, worth US$ 6.6 million, according to Interpol. That’s a step forward. But that some of them seem to be antiretroviral drugs for HIV threatens two steps back.
The first step [...]
As competition to treat people for HIV has hotted up, pharmaceutical companies have started dumping on one another. Using innuendo and not-quite-stated factoids, they are beginning to imply that the rival camp has something to hide (something they’ve no doubt learned from political campaigns). Those other drugs are toxic, discolouring, inconvenient. Activist groups and [...]
Since the Swiss noted that people who take their meds correctly and don’t have other infections are unlikely to pass on HIV, the public health establishment has been in a tizz over how to react. Predictably enough, Australian researchers have done what epidemiologists with a point to make so often do: — they’ve reached [...]
