Abstinence and faithfulness are often promoted as the only and best forms of protection against HIV infection. If the theory is true, in the real world abstinence and faithfulness have shown an impressive rate of failure. In a couple it takes two for it to work, and when single it takes an extremely powerfull mind to resist the call of nature, particularly under 30 (or more for some).
In a study published in Plos One, Keren Landman and colleagues examined the association between the number of sexual partners and HIV infection …

The criminalisation of HIV transmission or exposure has been a recurrent topics of the XVII International AIDS Conference with five major sessions and at least 20 different oral or poster presentations.
“Criminal HIV transmission and exposure laws spreading around the world ‘like a virus’” write Edwin J. Bernard at Aidsmap where he also reports on Justice Cameron’s plenary presentation about HIV criminalisation arround the world.
In his presentation, Judge Cameroon gives ten reasons why criminal prosecutions are bad policy:

Criminalisation is ineffective.
Criminal laws and criminal prosecutions are a poor substitutes for measures that …

It was bound to happen. With the development of anti retroviral therapies equally successful against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the Pharmaceutical industry had to enter the competitive arena of the mercantilisation of AIDS’s treatments and what best than using scary marketing techniques to sale drugs to fight a frightening disease?
Whilst GlaxoSmithKline has been advertising its protease inhibitor Lexiva over the background of a shark infested sea, Bristol-Myers Squibb showed an image of a toilet and says, “Ask your doctor if there are HIV medications with a low risk …

In an editorial for Health-e Anso Thom reminds us how People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) are easy preys for AIDS-revisionists and charlatans who make money on the back of the defenceless and vulnerable.
Thom reports on how South African national health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has been prompt to take off of the selves potentially unsafe conventional medicines but also how she was and still is less prompt to act when it comes to “natural remedies” promoted by charlatans such as Dr Rath and his Health Foundations or Zeblon …

Pathfinder international is publishing a timely report on “HIV Prevention Among Vulnerable Populations”. The choice of words here and in particular the use of vulnerability rather than group at risk is of importance.
The introduction of the report recalls that “in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, the term “at risk group” was applied to those social groups in which the first cases of the disease were diagnosed – MSM, SW and IDU.” As a consequence members of these groups where dehumanised, cast out and labelled as a social danger.
Later …