Two important articles have appeared in The Bangkok Post newspaper since last week’s cancellation of the 2nd Chiang Mai Gay Pride Parade because a small group of red-shirted pro-Thaksin demonstrators objected to the event taking place in a public space.
The first was an announcement by Pairote Boonsirikamchai, assistant secretary-general of the Medical Council of Thailand that under 18 now could receive a free HIV test and counselling at clinics without their parents’ consent.
This is definitively a step forward. By making counselling accessible to the most vulnerable people in society, that …

On 21st of February, the 2nd Chiang Mai Gay Pride Parade had to be called off following a stand-off with a small group of “Rak Chiang Mai 51″ red-shirted pro-Thaksin demonstrators who objected to the event taking place in a public space.
According to The Nation, “The protesters launched verbal attacks through a megaphone saying the event tarnished the city’s reputation.” The previous day, “a leading member of the “Rak Chiang Mai 51″ group said local residents disagreed with the parade as it was against the old city’s culture and could …

Bangkok World AIDS Day 2006 © peripheries

According to the Bangkok Post, Thailand Deputy Public Health Minister Manit Nopamornbode said that “about 11,700 people were expected to become new [HIV/AIDS] sufferers”.
Amongst these new sufferers, Manit identified “women who will get HIV from their lovers [...] gay men who have unprotected sex [..] men who get HIV from sex workers [and] will infect their wives, intravenous drug users, those having casual sex and prostitutes”
Children excluded, that is pretty much everybody.
Depending on the sources, there are between 516,000 t0 610,000 people living with …

Prof Montagnier who co-discovered the HIV virus that causes AIDS (always worth repeating) warmed in Calgary that HIV prevention should not be forgotten. Montagnier also criticised people’s complacency towards HIV and AIDS:
“It seems that the young generation has forgotten about prevention, because they think there are cures for HIV, that it’s no big deal”
Montagnier’s comments come at a time when treatment as prevention is one of the hottest topics at the 16th Conference on Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections where two studies have demonstrated that there is a lower risk of …

In a lengthy but rather well constructed and documented article published online in The East African, Curtis Abraham steers the charge against UNAIDS “for perpetuating the myth of condom effectiveness in Africa in the face of all evidence.”
Abraham rightly identifies that in a country like Uganda, the reduction in HIV incidence was not the result of condom-only prevention interventions (thanks to Helen Epstein for casting some light on the subject in her book “The Invisible Cure”) but was owning to behaviour changes and in particular partner-reduction campaigns such as that …