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 [...]
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 [...]
The very first post on this blog, on World AIDS Day 2007, compared HIV rates in the US capital with those in Ethiopia, Congo and Angola. Now the city has issued another excellent report on HIV, and people are begining to wake up to the disgrace (bloggers comment here and here and here and here).
Blog [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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]. [...]
From the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation we have a new game: Pos or Not? Players get to see a photo and profile of young men and women, then have to guess whether or not the person is HIV-infected. It’s intended to challenge prejudices and preconceptions, and I have to say it does it pretty well. [...]
The Wisdom of Whores isn’t published until next week, but one of the more absurd predictions in the book has come to pass.
Here’s the passage from the book.
Chatting with my friend Bert who works for the World Bank, I marvelled that almost every UN agency was on the AIDS bandwagon. Bert gave me a “Well [...]
A fashion designer turned massage parlour owner in Indonesia has come up with an inspired solution to the problem of unsafe sex: he’s padlocking his girls in to their trousers.
Paul Watson of the LA Times spoke to Franky Setiawan, owner of Doghado Massage Parlor, who came up with the chastity pants. Setiawan “says he came [...]
The World Bank and others plan to bribe young Tanzanians to stay HIV negative, according to Andrew Jack, writing in The Financial Times.
We know blackmail can work pretty well in HIV prevention. When brothel-owners in Thailand were told their businesses would be shut down if they didn’t ensure clients used condoms, condom use shot past [...]
