Treatment as a means to prevent HIV infection has hit the media following a declaration by Brian Williams, professor of epidemiology at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch, at the AAAS in San Diego.
Whilst the HIV epidemic has shown some signs of stabilisation in the recent years, more than 7,000 people are still infected every day with the virus that causes AIDS.
Despite interesting results of a vaccine trial in Thailand, prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not …

In a recent posting at Aid Watch, William Easterly makes the very good point that we could help the poor more if we were to bypass dubious charitable scheme like Product Red. William Easterly points out that if you really want to support altruistic causes, you should do it directly rather than paying the business man and tipping the poor.

The question Easterly does not answer is why don’t we send our bucks or quids straight to the Global Fund instead of spending them at Starbucks?
Guilt, the one we feel knowing …

And would alternative policies deliver in the fight against HIV/AIDS?
This is what Rick Rowden, Senior Policy Analyst at ActionAid International USA, puts forward in his book “The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS”.

I have not read the book yet but went to the recent UK launch organised by the publisher Zed at the SOAS in London. I can only report on my first impressions about the thesis that IMF policies, by constraining and limiting health policies and budgets in poor …

Documentary film maker Tim Samuels investigates the globalization of pornography and its connection to health issues in developing countries.
“In Ghana you see the most extraordinary impact of the mainstream western pornography which is predominantly made in Los Angeles and is predominantly condom free. That pornography somehow makes its way to even the most remote and obscure parts of Ghana in Africa.
There are villages which don’t even have electricity; where people live in mud huts; where generators get wheeled into the village and mud huts get turned into impromptu pornographic cinemas. …

Something different with no HIV or condoms, this may come as a rather boring and cryptic essay but some may find it an interesting read. Don’t feel obliged!
Globalisation has been the buzzword of the roaring nineties and with the fall of the Berlin’s wall, the end of the cold war and the victory of capitalism over socialism it has opened a new era in human history. Rightly or not, globalisation has become synonymous with market economy, capitalism and development. Much discussions, books and movies have placed it at the centre …