Finally, some common sense in HIV testing policy in the US. Although you’d be hard pressed to know it from some of the coverage.
Until last Monday, America’s unfathomably illogical health service for the properly poor, Medicaid, refused to pay for HIV testing just as it refuses to pay for all sorts of other screening [...]
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 US voted for hope. It (we, I) voted for change. It (we, I) got a president who suggested sensible things like basing health policy on good science. The US even got some senators who followed through with funding for programmes that would teach young people that if you want to have sex and not [...]
The Colombian President says we’ve lost the war on drugs. So does his predecesor. And his Mexican counterpart. Not to mention Harvard economists. Oh, and the editors of The Economist. Is it conceivable that the United Nations and the US government, that have for so long dug their heels into the mud of prohibition as [...]
Many people are thrilled that the Bush Years are almost over. Few more so than sex workers, who have essentially been declared not to exist under the administration’s HIV funding rules. Though many are disappointed that Mark Dybul will stay at the helm of PEPFAR for a while, some of us hope that he’ll do [...]
The death rattle of the Bush administration puts it, once again, in the company of great defenders of human rights such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. This time, it breathes its sickness on gays.
The US is one of nearly 60 countries which stamped its feet in opposition to France’s declaration (made in the United [...]
Tuesday evening. I spent it with baited breath sitting at the bar in Baltimore airport, surrounded by boys with buzz-cuts and camouflage who were headed for Iraq. They seemed strangely unconcerned by the drama that was unfolding in red and blue on the screens in front of us. I, for my part, nearly missed my [...]
Stolen from Sean Casey, with thanks.
It’s been a good year for citizens interested in science. Several of the biggest funders of scientific research, including the US taxpayer funded National Institutes of Health, have said that the results of any research they pay for must be made available to the public. The big academic publishers — the dinosaurs of the internet [...]
Bush may be quacking around with a limp, but the fundamentalists that support him are squeezing all they can out of these last, lame-duck months. For me, the first sign that US Christians were prepared to terrorise people into dropping contraception was this poster in the Tanzanian capital Dar Es Salaam. But it now looks [...]
