So instead, I’ll have a rant about something that is somehow still shocking to me: the lengths to which loopy anti-abortion groups in the United States will go to deprive women of safe contraception and sexual health care. The target, once again, is Planned Parenthood. Over a one-week period last month, men went in to the sexual health service providers clinics in 11 cities, claiming to be sex traffickers seeking services, including abortions, for the underage girls they’ve enslaved. That would be a really dumb strategy for a real sex trafficker — in the US, even more than in Britain, the authorities are under pressure to find the army of enslaved girls that the abolitionists conjure up at every turn. It’s a well-hidden army; though a massive UK crackdown led to over 500 arrests related to selling sex a while back, it didn’t yield a single trafficker. Not that that has stopped the abolitionists’ conjuring. Shame on The Guardian for not referring back to its own excellent investigative work in this area.

Planned Parenthood immediately suspected that no trafficker would be that dumb. Certainly not 11 traffickers in different cities in a week, when such a thing had never happened before. Though it smelled like a hoax, they dutifully reported the alleged trafficking to the FBI and asked for an investigation. Now Loopy anti-abortionist group Live Action has admitted, with some pride, to their juvenile prank. They’ve released two of their “undercover” videos, to which they’ve they added juvenile-prank-style title screens.

My personal favourite: “Planned Parenthood Gets the Pimp Discount for His Underage Sex Slaves”. I will say that the clinic manager in New Jersey sails pretty close to the wind. But then which of us who has tried to provide services for people in need who have nowhere else to go does not bend the rules? As Planned Parenthood says: “Falsely claiming sex trafficking to health professionals to advance a political agenda is an astoundingly cynical form of political activity.”

Compared to this, the standard operating procedures in the AIDS world — using Global Fund money to buy 4x4s for officials — seem somewhat tame.

Update: (or rather backdate). Steve sent me this interesting reminder of an earlier assault on Planned Parenthood. Sigh.

And it is happening in the northern Nigerian state of Bauchi, according to the BBC’s Shehu Saulawa. The Red Cross conducted a survey of sex workers in the conservative Islamic state, identifying around 320 of them. The next thing they knew the women were being rounded up by the Sharia commission, the defender of Islamic virtue, at least according to the BBC correspondent. (The Sharia commission denies the women were being arrested, saying that its staff were simply “supervising”, because “In every nook and corner and cranny, illegal acts were being committed contrary to Sharia law”).

According to the Beeb story, between 75 and 100 of the 320 women have so far tested positive for HIV. It’s not clear who’s doing the testing, but that’s a prevalence of between a quarter and a third of sex workers infected, “so far”. Horribly high, but not out of line with what’s happening elsewhere in the country. The long awaited report on the 2007 HIV surveillance round (pdf) is finally out: one in two women working in the brothels of Kano and FCT are infected with HIV. The lowest recorded rates are in Lagos, at just under one in four.

HIV rates are astoundingly high among gay men in Nigeria, too (again, close to a quarter of gay men in Lagos are infected) though somewhat surprisingly they are lower among drug injectors. And gay men don’t fare any better than sex workers at the hands of Bauchi’s morality police. Earlier this month a judge slung 18 cross-dressers in jail for messing with sharia law banning homosexuality. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in 15 years of dealing with HIV, it is that even where patterns of sexual networking allow for it, HIV will only spread through the “general population” if it first reaches a critical mass within sub-populations with the highest turnover of partners: sex workers, gay men and drug injectors. In other words, in any epidemic, but especially one where many adults do have sex with several long-term partners but HIV is currently concentrated among people with highest risk, it makes sense to invest in prevention for these groups.

Oh, we’ve learned something else, too. If you try to squash these groups rather than engage with them, HIV rises. What has Nigeria (and its major HIV funders, the United States and Global Fund) made of these lessons? Well, in 2007 The US invested 53 million dollars in HIV prevention, according to the PEPFAR website.

“Prevention activities in Nigeria include prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT), abstinence and be faithful (AB) programs, blood and injection safety, and other prevention initiatives, including activities focused on high risk populations.”

High risk populations? Hurrah! But no, it doesn’t mean sex workers. Rather, PEPFAR Nigeria singles out “girls who marry at a young age, causing their sexual debut to occur at an early age. This group, which has a mean age at first marriage of 14.6 years, is a vulnerable and largely underserved population…”

The Global Fund doesn’t fund prevention at all, except for the “innocent babies” thing. Though the clarion call these days is “Know Your Epidemic”, it doesn’t seem to translate into “Do The Right Thing About Your Epidemic”. And when the “knowing” it bit ends up with people getting slung in jail, you’ve got to wonder whether it’s worthwhile collecting all those data.

Thanks to Sean Lyons for the Bauchi tip

You don’t actually have to show that you’re preventing the spread of HIV, but don’t forget to include the affected, the infected, the public, the private, the faithful and the activist on your team. Don’t forget to use some of the money to pay for workshops; then you can use the same words to make up your cards for Bullshit Bingo!

Here are the “hot button” words The Wisdom of Whores has chosen for your profit. If you think there are any crucial ones that are missing, let me know and I’ll add them to the Generator. Remember, though, to tell me if they are nouns or verbs — in our verbose business you never can tell.

I ripped the code for this fine tool off from Sciencegeek, who in turn ripped it off from Dack.com’s Web Economy BS Generator, Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, you’re doing great things for global health.

Re-cap of how (Red) works. Bono leans on companies to sign up; they pay (Red) a fee and part of the profits from any (Red) branded product. Companies look holy and responsible, consumers feel warm and fuzzy about buying stuff they were going to buy anyway, and ad agenices make money. In fact if you saw the Dell ad that ran during the Superbowl, you’ll know that buying red stuff can also get you pats on the arse and passionate kisses from strangers.

The other thing that happens when you buy red stuff is that a fair bit of cash, US$ 59 million so far, goes to the Global Fund. So far so good. But here’s where I get stroppy. The whole principle of the Global Fund was supposed to be that everyone would throw their money into a pot, and the resulting stew would get doled out to governments and others who had come up with good, solid plans for preventing HIV and caring for those infected. Donors can’t pick and choose: “I’ll give money to the fund but only if it buys medicine for babies, not if it buys clean needles for junkies”.

Unless you’re Bono, apparently. He’s managed to cherry-pick the projects which press those warm, fuzzy buttons with consumers, and on top of that work only in the countries that already have pretty strong systems. So it’s drugs to prevent pregnant women passing HIV on to their babies, treatment for sick people, and support for orphans in Swaziland, Rwanda and Ghana. These are all fine things to do, but they are things that everyone wants to do. You could argue (indeed, Red does argue) that their money frees up other Global Fund money for other things. But by deciding what is “saleable” and what isn’t in HIV care (for it seems Red thinks no HIV prevention efforts are warm and fuzzy enough) the corporates are undermining the wider fight against the epidemic.