I’m wondering whether the Daily Christian’s aestehtics might achieve what their messages don’t. They suggest you “Size up for a looser fit”. Baggy thongs, eh? I’m thinking that the girls who take that advice might just be among the 27% or so of US virginity pledgers (pdf) who haven’t allowed hormones to get the better of good intentions by the time they leave high school.

Thanks to Salon’s Broadsheet for this one.

USAID employees trawling POPLINE, a database used by demographers and researchers in reproductive health, found two articles dealing with abortion advocacy, which they say did not fit the database’s criteria. And so POPLINE administrators made “abortion” an invisible search term, like the words “the” or “a”. The move was spotted by librarians at UCSF, who raised hell. Eventually, the clamour reached the ears of Michael Klag, dean of the school of public health at Johns Hopkins University, which houses the database. He made abortion visible again, double-quick.

My question is: why are US taxpayers paying salaries for people to trawl through 360,000 articles to find two that may be “not consistent with the cirteria”? Was it USAID staff who were doing this work? Or was the work done for them by some lobbyist group, producing a knee-jerk response of self-censorship? That was what happened back in 2003, when the Traditional Values Coalition made lists of federally funded research dealing with offensive people such as sex workers and drug users. It was after they passed these lists to Congress that NIH started calling researchers in to justify themselves and their previously-approved studies. And after that that some researchers just decided not to do, or not to publicise, research that Congress considers icky.

I suspect that the terrorists have succeeded, as good terrorists do, in trapping us in great round of fear. POPLINE staff restrict abortion as a search word because they fear they will lose USAID funding. USAID trawls through databases in search of abortion-related wickedness because it fears it will lose Congresional funding. But USAID can only lose funding if Congress decides to cut its funding. And Congress is made up of men and women who, at least ostensibly, want to please the constituents who vote for them. So Congress will only cut funding for USAID if it fears voters will throw them out if they spend money on useful databases of 360,000 articles, two of which talk about abortion advocacy. Since the majority of members of Congress are Democrats, that seems like an unlikely outcome.

It’s time that Democrats in Congress started to realise that when they’re making public health policy, they’ve got nothing to fear but fear itself. They should not leave it to librarians to defend democracy in the United States.

(If any kind librarian can point me to two offending articles now removed from POPLINE, I’d be agog tp read them).

Today, the US House of Representatives discusses a bill that will take US$ 50 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets and put it on the table for HIV treatment for people in poor countries. There’s some prevention in the new PEPFAR bill, too, though we’re still not allowed to use the money effectively to make life safer for people who inject drugs or sell sex. The new bill will increase the amount of money we can spend preventing HIV infected women passing the virus on to their infants (that cost US taxpayers US$ 195 million in 2007 alone). But not one cent will be available for services or advice that would prevent those women getting pregnant in the first place.

Why not? Apparently, because of aggressive lobbying on the part of an increasingly vocal anti-conctraception movement in Washington. The original draft bill reauthorising PEPFAR recognised that reproductive health services and HIV prevention should go hand in hand in countries where HIV is spread mostly in non-commercial sex between men and women (in other words in all of East and Southern Africa, and some of West Africa too). (see the draft text here). Then the Fundamentalists stuck their oar in. By the time the bill got through the House Foreign Affairs Committee, no PEPFAR money could be used to provide contraceptive advice or services for couples with HIV (though they may still get some condoms for disease prevention.

The hyper-conservative Family Research Council was one of the groups lobbying for the change, and FRC President Tony Perkins crowed about the victory in a press release:

“This bill is a marked improvement and is aimed at protecting life, not destroying it. …I especially applaud Rep. Chris Smith for his tireless work to ensure that PEPFAR does not create new family planning programs to fund international abortion groups.”

On their own website, FRC are even more explicit:

“Additionally the bill removes the “reproductive health” references that the Democratic majority was trying to insert.”

American Christians ranting about abortion is hardly stop-the-presses stuff. But there’s a not-so-subtle slide in the rhetoric these days: in the minds of the Hard Core, contraception is now equivalent to abortion. Pro-life is becoming anti-contraception, and no amount of common sense commentary seems to make any difference. If the good pastors of the United States wish to have no sex or large families, rah rah for them. But Congress should not allow them to impose their obsessions on the rest of the world. The current PEPFAR bill will do just that.

If you have any doubts about the move to smush contraception together with abortion into one big, evil, liberal, feminazi assault on what is Good and Right, take a minute and a half to look at this:

A catholic NGO, calling itself Human Life International, has put up three of these billboards in Tanzania. It’s president, Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, crows about this achievement on a Catholic web site, and immediately sticks his hand out for cash:

Now that you see the impact our billboards are having, I need you to send HLI the largest gift you can so we can spread this program to every one of the 55 nations on the continent of Africa!
The cost to do so is prohibitive … $6,000 per country (that’s how much we sent Emil Hagamu, our man in Tanzania, to erect the three billboards) … times 55 countries … equals $330,000! That money will enable HLI to erect three billboards in each country.

He is lauded by promoters of the wider spread of HIV, such as Jill Stanek, whose grasp on epidemiology is a feeble as her moral logic. To Jill’s credit, she’s one of the few of the anti-condom evangelists who actually allows comments on her site. Others, such as Brown Pelican, Doug Laurence et al propagate this stuff without allowing others to have their say. Tanzanians themselves are appalled by the billboards’ insidious suggestion that condoms do not protect against HIV. Read this editorial from The Citizen, for example.

On the “clouds and silver linings” front, I suppose I could say that Human Life International are equal opportunity slanderers. Because after all, doesn’t this poster also suggest that if you’re faithful, you’ll end up a skeleton sooner rather than later?

Of course that 1.4% figure hides something much more frightening: among Ukranians who inject drugs, between 20% and 50% are infected with HIV across most of the country. (pdf)

These people need clean needles and condoms, so that they can avoid passing on their infection. They need access to methadone and other treatments that will help them to stop injecting, and eventually to get off drugs completely. But Russian Ministries, an Illinois-based organisation with a budget of over three million dollars a year, has other ideas about how to help. According to the Russian Ministries update:

“For the second year in a row, young Next Generation Christians from the Rivne “School Without Walls” presented “Stop Drugs,” a weeklong event that included talks about God and Christian morals, an art contest and culminated in a concert with Christian music bands.”

The missionaries issue this “Call To Action”:

* Pray that Russian Ministries will be effective in helping train church leaders in cutting-edge outreach.
* Pray that the church will be influential in reducing the HIV/AIDS rate in Ukraine.

The online missionaries are in no doubt that getting involved with HIV prevention will save souls. Which is all well and good. But unless they provide clean needles, condoms and other essential services as well as prayers, they will save souls without saving lives.

“Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men in key urban areas are infected with HIV, with a 33 percent increase in new diagnoses among our brothers under age 30 over the past six years. Today, right now, African Americans are nearly 10 times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with AIDS. The response — internal to our community and external — is appallingly racist. Internally, when these numbers come out, the “established” gay community seems to have a collective shrug as if this isn’t our problem. Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi, we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.

This simple statement of fact has reverberated through the blogosphere ever since. Notable amongst the commentators have been Christians of all denominations (see here and here, for example, and some of the good, old-fashioned gay-bashers here (although inexplicable silence from the Traditional Values Coallition, authors of the absurd The Agenda: The Homosexual Plan to Change America). Most of these commentators are gloating, as if Foreman had said “Most HIV transmission is among gay men, therefore gay men are wicked and should be struck by lightening”. Of course that’s not what he said, and it is unseemly and childish to imply otherwise.

There’s been some understandable indignation on the part of gay rights groups. But some disingenuity, too. The usually sensible Good As You says:

While AIDS is not exclusively a gay problem and claiming it is one is EXTREMELY dangerous, we are the community that — for reasons unknown — were hit earliest and hardest.

For reasons unknown?! Please! Has basic scientific education really sunk to such a level in the United States? (Given this recent, much e-mailed piece about the dumbing down of America, perhaps it has.) If any readers need a refresher on the risk of HIV transmission in anal sex in a period of high viraemia, i.e. in communities where multiple partnerships within a two month time frame are common (and on top of that in which it is physically possible to switch between insertive and receptive roles in sex), please feel free to get in touch.