The bill allowing another US$ 50 billion of US taxpayer’s cash to be spent on HIV in developing countries has finally been given the thumbs up by the Senate. There’s good and bad drafted on to the PEPFAR legislation. The good is the dropping of a law which forbids foreigners with HIV from sullying the [...]
If you live your life among people whose lives, jobs or natural curiousity open their minds to the world, it is easy to forget how rigid some people are in their views. Today, I was sent a shocking reminder of the vitriol that comes with a small mind; it made me understand why some of [...]
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, [...]
We don’t have many success stories in HIV prevention. And it seems like the Bush government is determined to undermine the ones we do have. Cambodia and Uganda, both shining examples of success in HIV prevention, are being squashed into failure by ideologues who would rather see people die than help sex workers and young [...]
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 [...]
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]. [...]
The head of Uganda’s AIDS commission says his country can’t afford to do any HIV prevention work with gay men, according to the Pink News. Though they’ve got hundreds of millions in the AIDS funding trough, and have their snouts raised for more.
“Gays are one of the drivers of HIV in Uganda, but because of [...]
We’ve all known for ages that there are essentially two HIV epidemics in the world: a heterosexual epidemic in East and Southern Africa (some would say all of sub-Saharan Africa) and an epidemic driven by drug injection, sex between men and commercial sex in the rest of the world. Now there’s another distinction, too. There [...]
The First Lady of Uganda, Janet Museveni, thinks that increasing access to HIV treatment is making Ugandans more promiscuous, according to a story in Sunday’s The New Vision. We’ve certainly seen evidence of that in rich countries, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason it wouldn’t be the same in poorer parts of the [...]
Two of the Republican senators accused of holding to ransom some US$ 50 billion in US funding for HIV in Africa are fighting back. They are also ill-educated, badly confused, or lying through their teeth.
After a Washington Post editorial accused them of foot-dragging on AIDS funding in part because they worried that money might be [...]
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