I’ve always been curious to know what a random investigator would make of my in-box. Lots of people find theirs clogged with offers of penis extensions and tireless nights of love; I have the added joy of getting soft-peddalled syphilis diagnostic kits. I also get alerted when medical journals publish papers on a variety of [...]
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga won’t get laid this week. Or at least not at home — his wife Ida is leading a national sex boycott. And he may not have better luck outside the home; activists have done a deal with sex workers, paying them not to give their men relief in the boycott [...]
When we were trying to think of how to spend two million dollars of US taxpayers money on preventing the rampant growth of a non-existent HIV epidemic in a tiny country with no risk (East Timor), one of my colleagues suggested finding every sexually active man in the capital Dili and dipping their private parts [...]
Scientists
Now that over 40 million people are taking Prozac and similar medication to cheer themselves up, we learn that they may as well be taking sugar-pills. Waving the Freedom of Information act as a warrant to gain access to data drug companies haven’t wanted to publish, researchers looked again at whether people popping Prozac actually [...]
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 [...]
