The paper, in the (wonderful, open access Public Library of Science), even includes a little cartoon video. Bat porn. In essence, scientists in China have found that a female fruit bat will go down on her partner while he’s taking her from behind. Apparently, the extra stimulation helps him keep it up longer (not a universal observation among females of our species, I venture to guess). The researchers come up with a number of reasons why a lady bat might go to this trouble, among them that it might give his sperm more oomph, might make him less likely to roam, might clean up nasty infections before he passes them to her. But I particularly like their closing shot:

“The behaviour presumably favours the donor, although it may also benefit both partners especially if fertilization success is increased. It is conceivable that the female manipulates the male by increasing sexual stimulation, so that she ultimately benefits.”

I think that’s known as the Pleasure Principle.

Thanks to Klaus for stimulating me to post on this.

The idea is to force the country’s squabbling politicians, and most particularly the squabblers-in-chief President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, to behave more sensibly. (Lucy Kibaki hasn’t yet said whether she’ll join in.)

A whole week without sex: imagine! The idea that this would be enough to get Kenya’s politicians to give up a lifetime’s habit of self-interested tribal and party politicking says quite a bit, doesn’t it? When epidemiologists suggest that one reason HIV spreads more rapidly in East and Southern Africa than elsewhere is because the timing, frequency and volume of sexual partnerships support that spread, we’re told we’re racist (as though somehow having lots of sex is a bad thing….). Now we have the women of Kenya planning to change the world by depriving men of sex for a single week. I can’t see the prospect of that bringing many British MPs to their knees.

Actually, I don’t think for a moment that the good womenfolk of Kenya think that their men can’t make it through the week without sex. New research published today (in the wonderful, open-access Public Library of Science) that included 1,161 Kenyan couples found that they had sex four times a month on average. Giving up one of those four times hardly seems like a big sacrifice. I’m interested, though, in how they are going to pay top-up fees to all the striking sex workers — over 7,000 girls would normally be bringing in the cash each night in Nairobi’s central business district alone.

I’m also mildly amused by the “men are pigs, women are saints” ethos that underlies the sex boycott. The annoucement of the boycott itself has drawn fighting words from the leaders of some women’s organisations. In a country where one in 13 adults are infected with sexually transmitted HIV, 60% of them women, some women’s leaders still think it is wicked to talk about sex. This from The Nation:

Maendeleo ya Wanawake [Women's Development Organisation] vice-chair Rahab Muiu criticised the presence of the organisation’s chairperson at a press conference where the strike was announced. “As the largest women’s organisation in the country, we strongly believe in family values and cannot be associated with such foul utterances which can only break families,” Mrs Muiu said.
She said chairperson Rukia Subow supported the sex boycott in her personal capacity. However, Mrs Subow has come out fighting, retorting: “I set the agenda for women in this country.”
The organisation’s assistant national secretary, Mrs Elizabeth Mayieka, said women in Nyanza were beaten by their husbands over the proposed boycott. She condemned the boycott, saying it is taboo to talk about bedroom matters in public and in the presence of children.

Thanks to Lisa McCandless

Now, researchers in neighbouring Australia are suggesting that slathering penises in oestrogen cream might do just as well. The study, published in the (wonderful, open access) Public Library of Science, showed that creaming the underside of the foreskin gold-plates (well, keratinises) the sensitive Langerhans cells, that can act as a conduit for HIV into the body. They suggest this might have the same effect as lopping off the foreskin, but would be cheaper and less likely to enrage the Whole Organ lobby.
They only tried it on two men, it’s true, and they haven’t actually shown that it has any effect on the acquisition of HIV. But they did measure a “highly significant increase in the number of desquamated, keratinised epithelian cells”.

Any volunteers, lads?

“The rise of electronic publishing [1], preprint archives, blogs, and wikis is raising concerns among publishers, editors, and scientists about the present day relevance of academic journals and traditional peer review [2]. These concerns are especially fuelled by the ability of search engines to automatically identify and sort information [1]. It appears that academic journals can only remain relevant if acceptance of research for publication within a journal allows readers to infer immediate, reliable information on the value of that research.”

But the discussion (which is usually the Plain English section of a paper) veers deep into the Land of Nerd. For example:

Our finding that the distribution of number of citations is log-normal is in agreement with recent generative models of the citation network [21], [22] that predict a log-normal distribution for subsets of papers related by content similarity. Note that this result is not in disagreement with prior claims about the power-law behavior of the citation distribution [23], as the convolution of many log-normal distributions with different means can yield a distribution that can be hard to distinguish from a power law….

Our findings thus suggest the possibility of ranking journals according to q̅(J). To this end, we turn to a heuristic used in information retrieval called the Probability Ranking Principle [24]. This principle dictates that the optimal ranking of a set of journals will be the one that maximizes the probability that given a pair of papers (a,b) from journals A and B, respectively, q(a)>q(b) if A is above B in that ranking. This probability is also known as the multi-class “area under curve” (AUC) statistic [25]–[27]

The role of open access publishing in a changing scientific landscape is an important one, and good bloggers can increase its importance. But if we want to push that role with a wider public, we’re going to have to summarise our findings in some way that everyone can understand.

The response to placebo in these trials was exceptionally large, duplicating more than 80% of the improvement observed in the drug groups.

PsyBlog notes that Irving Kirsch has made a career out of studying the placebo effect, so he may be grinding his axes in this study. But overall, it looks to me like great news. It means that people who are feeling a little grotty about life can take more or less any pill and feel better. (People who are feeling very grotty about life still do better on antidepressants, the analysis found). The paper is guarded in its discussion of how decisions about drug approval and prescription are made, but they give some very interesting insights into how drug companies try to stack the jury in favour of a new drug. Here’s an example:

“Replacement of patients who investigators determined were not improving after 2 wk was allowed in three fluoxetine [Prozac] trials and in the three sertraline [Zoloft] trials for which data were reported. The trials also included a 1- to 2-wk washout period during which patients were given placebo, prior to random assignment. Those whose scores improved 20% or more were excluded from the study prior to random assignment.”

If I understand that correctly, it means that in these (mostly 6 week) trials, researchers could kick out the people who weren’t doing well right away (thus stacking the jury in favour of those who do well on Prozac), having already kicked out those who did too well before even getting the drug (this stacking the jury against those who do well on the placebo). These are the rules by which we allow the pharmaceuticial industry to operate? Honestly, it’s enough to drive you to anti-depressants.

The drugs included in the meta-analysis were: fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone)

This is surprising in a one small way. Once HIV has started bashing down a woman’s immune system, she’s less likely to get pregnant. So it was astonishing to find that 53% of the pregnant women who died were HIV-infected (compared with an average in the Maputo region of 21%). But in a much bigger way, it is not a bit surprising. HIV kills people, and there’s no reason it would avoid killing women who have recently been pregnant or given birth (though the paper, published in the wonderful, open-access Public Library of Science, does not address the interesting question of whether pregnancy might actually accelerate HIV disease).

The paper comes up with the not-very-insightful conclusion that if we did more to prevent and treat diseases in women who get pregnant, fewer women who get pregnant would die. But hell, if the goal of reducing maternal mortality (one of the gloriously Quixotic Millenium Development Goals) somehow encourages us to reverse our failure to reduce HIV (another Millenium Development Goal), it can only be a good thing. Though of course if it’s just a matter of meeting the goals, we could take another approach to avoiding maternal mortality related to HIV infection. Contraception for HIV-infected women would do the trick.

Update: Chris Green brings my attention to an observational study which suggests, inconclusively, that pregnant women with HIV may have slower disease progression than women who don’t get pregnant. See here for more.