As promised, data on women, autonomy, partnerships and HIV. It’s quite true that I have not developed some magic indicator of “autonomy”. But the World Economic Forum has. Or at least its Gender Equality Index is as close as damnit. Let’s take the sub-Saharan African countries at either extreme, and set their equality index against [...]
Not wanting to be always the purveyor of bad news, I was looking forward to today’s results from the Pro2000 microbicide studies. After hopeful results in an earlier trial, I’d convinced myself the gel would prevent HIV.
As promised, a note on the UK’s latest data on HIV among drug injectors. Some of the US’s battalions of Drug Warriors have been crowing that the new figures show a rise in infection rates among junkies in the UK: clear evidence that the nation’s policy of making sterile needles and injecting equipment available to [...]
Yesterday the US finally dropped its absolutely senseless law forbidding people with HIV from visiting the Land of the Free. (While Saint Obama is getting patted on the back for ending the ban, he was actually signing off on something that George Bush put in motion last year). That’s unmitigated good news for people with [...]
I’ve been roused from my long summer torpor by a row over a German ad that tries to make Hitler the face of AIDS. Predictably enough, activist groups immediately yelled “stigma”! What we should be yelling is “dinosaurs!”. In Western Europe, AIDS is no longer the “mass murderer” the ad claims. In fact, it is [...]
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 [...]
Sequestered in Indonesia, I’ve let pass many interesting stories in the past week — I’ll get around to circumcision, Nobel prizes and pornography bills soon, really. One story I didn’t expect to revisit was the “news” that HIV has been with us for a century or more. But it has caused such a stir that [...]
Christian fundamentalism and HIV seem both to be on the upswing in Uganda. I’ve remarked before that enthusiastic support for abstinence-only programmes has undermined previously successful HIV prevention efforts in the country. But now it seems over-zealous preachers are threatening the success of treatment efforts, too.
Robert Ochai, director of the trailblazing AIDS support organisation TASO, [...]
From Heather, at A Minha Vida, I learned of an interesting compilation of HIV-related slang (originally from PlusNews). As they observe, the euphemisms we choose to say the unsayable often tell us quite a bit about our own cultures. In Angola, for example, getting HIV is like “pisar na min” –stepping on a landmine. But [...]
Our genes are amazing. They win battles for us against some pathogens (malaria), but their victories can leave us exposed to others (HIV). That’s the lesson from a fascinating paper published recently in Cell and Host Microbe.
Researchers looking at data from a large group of American servicemen have found that a genetic mutation which made [...]
