The Wisdom of Whores

South Park is at it again, being funny about a deadly subject. Tut tut.

Want to know why nice girls sell sex? I’ve trawled through hundreds of academic papers pontificating about the motivation for selling sex, I’ve listened to quite a bit of gender-jargon from self-righteous feminists, and I’ve been sjubjected to too much of the sexploitation rhetoric from right-wing religious relics. But I’ve rarely seen a more straight-forward [...]

My gorgeous Goddaughter Poppy and her family live in Kachin state in the north of Burma, close to the Chinese border. The capital of Kachin, Myitkyina, sticks in my mind as the place with the highest HIV prevalence I’ve ever seen in routine surveillance data: over 80% in drug injectors throughout most of the 1990s. [...]

After huddling late into the night, US politicians have come up with a compromise. They’ll spend more money on innnocent victims of AIDS, but none to protect those wicked people who sell sex for a living. The US congress house of representatives House Committee on Foreign Affairs agreed to spend an astonishing US$ 50 billion [...]

Untuk kawan-kawan pembaca di Indonesia: di CCF Salemba ada pameran tentang AIDS, dan juga akan putar film “Harapan Lahir Dari Pengetahuan”. Menerutku judul aggak norah, tetapi gaya film belum tentu ikut judulnya, kan?

A new study in the UK inidcates that doctors aren’t doing very well at diagnosing HIV. The study looks at diagnosis in primary infection, the few weeks or months when a person first becomes infected with HIV, when the virus replicates like mad and people often feel fluey. It’s an important time to catch infection, [...]

A week ago, the outgoing executive director of the US’s National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Matt Foreman made a great speech in which he called for proper equality for all Americans, regardless of who they sleep with. He also said this: “Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men [...]

A study in Mozambique looks at what is killing women during childbirth or over the following 42 days. We tend to think of “maternal mortality” as deaths from haemorrhage or other obstetric complications, but in this case, more women died of infectious diseases than of pregnancy-or-delivery-gone-wrong. And of the infectious diseases, the biggest killer was [...]

From the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation comes a very useful summary of where each of the US presidential candidates stands on HIV issues. The summaries for Obama and Clinton are so similar that I ran a “compare docs” on them. Besides substituting names and genders (he/she), the only real differences are: Obama supports “comprehensive sex [...]

I’m aware that my ambivalent attitude towards tracing the sex partners of HIV-infected people in order to offer them testing, prevention services and treatment if necessary is unpopular in some quarters. When I look at what the Egyptian government is up to, I can really see why. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, [...]

CDC researchers have reported three cases where kids were apparently infected with HIV through food fed to them after it had first been chewed by someone else. Three. Out of over 60 million infections worldwide. In order to be consistent with my earlier stand on the risks of transmitting HIV while on ARVs, I’m going [...]

Cynical about Bono and his “shop-your-way-to-heaven” approach to AIDS? A report in The New York Times reminds us that for the people whose lives are being prolonged with money bought off the back off a red i-Pod, drugs count for more than sneering. Reporter Ron Dixon talks to the sneerers, too, including the folks at [...]

Everyone knows about the behaviours that spread HIV. But if you’re at all hazy on the mechanics, how the virus actually manages its assault on an uninfected person, this video is for you. Thanks to Boehringer-Ingelheim for paying for this. See, Big Pharma’s not all bad…

As Think Progress and CREDO pointed out, George Bush shouldn’t have been quite so smug in his State of the Union address. They list some of the ways that US money is undermining progress against HIV. But I’m afraid they’ve missed some other gems that the administration has thrown up in the way of effective [...]

Celeb economist Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, has been drawing attention to the fact that women can earn more selling sex than in lots of other jobs — around four times more, at least in Chicago. In the UK, between two and three times more, if you add up hours worked over a week. Two [...]

This week, over 15,000 people converged on the Thai capital Bangkok to chit chat about religion’s role in helping people with HIV, Thailand’s Nation newspaper reports. The paper quotes Asian Interfaith Network on HIV/AIDS chairperson Pramaha Boonchuay Doojai as saying that “People with HIV can spend their life in communities peacefully if religious organisation help [...]

In an eminently sensible editorial, Daniel Halperin recently argued that the vast resources available for AIDS in the developing world, and especially in Africa, are threatening to crush other important priorities such as basic sanitation. This has prompted a prickly response from the Global AIDS Alliance. Somewhat predictably, the Global AIDS Alliance argues that we [...]

So Congress has finally passed the US$ 556 billion budget bill (Reuters). It now goes to George Bush to be signed. As John McManus and others note, the bill is laden with pork. McManus is rightly infuriated by how keen most Congressmen are to bring home the pork, in other words, to bundle spending on [...]

While I was at the gender meeting in Nairobi mentioned in the article, some friends and I played “Bullshit Bingo” a game that passes the time in jargon-filled UN meetings. Here is my (not quite completed) bingo card. I wrote my own destruction into the bottom right hand corner. In a three day meeting about [...]