In The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West and the Fight against AIDS, Helen Epstein suggests that “What may have helped spare the West a heterosexual AIDS epidemic on the scale of Africa’s is the romantic belief that there is a”perfect partner” , a “soul mate”, to be cherished “for richer or poorer” – if not for life, then for a long time.”
This is a rather convincing argument. Epstein built here on some serious research made in collaboration with Population Service International (PSI) and previously published in Health and Policy development. …

The most controversial, if not the only controversial idea put forward by E. Pisani in her book The Wisdom of Whores, is what she sees as the next logical step after opt-out testing for HIV: requiring “people who are getting free AIDS drug to show up for prevention service, too.” She is well aware that activists who have ripened in a “culture of confidentiality” would be horrified.
Now imagine that this was happening, that to ensure that patients adhere to their treatment they receive each month free call time on their …

The Sunday Times reports that “The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.” For example, Sutent, and anti cancer drug used to treat kidney cancer that extend patient’s lives by 6 months but cost £2,200 a month compared to the standard NHS drug that cost £800 a month is not available on the NHS. Likewise, Erbitux, costing about £3,000 a month but more potent …

More than 25 years into a pandemic that affects 33 millions people in 2007 and has caused the death of millions, the myth that HIV does not cause AIDS is still alive and strong.
More than 25 years and the same old myths are rehashed and the same old abuses of science are perpetuated all over the world and thanks to the Internet are accessible to everybody, most frighteningly in countries where the virus has already spread in large swaths of the populations at risk.
In India, for example, Mayank Tewari writer …

Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland, through the completion of the Human Genome Project has announced that he will be stepping down from his position on August 1, 2008.

In the 90s, Collins led the challenge against Craig Venter’s venture to sequence the Human Genome. Having successfully completed the genome project on 2003 (from which Venter draw extensively for his own project partially based on his own DNA) Collins and the NHGRI started a variety of initiatives, including the …