Just before “Treatment as Prevention” hit the headlines with some controversy, PrEP or Pre Exposure Prophylaxis, was on everybody’s lips.

PrEP is an experimental approach that would use antiretroviral medications (ARVs, which are normally used to treat people living with HIV) to reduce the risk of HIV infection in HIV-negative people. In this intervention, HIV-negative people would take a single drug or a combination of drugs with the hope that it would lower their risk of infection if exposed to HIV. PrEP trials are ongoing around the world. (Source: AVAC)

Whilst some …

Lost Decade Gays

It used to be simple: there were the Gay ones and the Rest (though the Rest would have said that “there was us and the Gay guy next door”). But starting at the end of the “sleepy 50s” to climax by the end of the “Glorious 30s” (1945-1975), a sexual revolution had happened and had revealed a world of sexualities.
It was no coincidence that the “Lost Decade” (1980-1990) inaugurated by the abandon of state-led development policies in favour of Neo-liberalism was also the starting point of the tragic …

Three major reports have been published recently about HIV prevention and how it is failing those most vulnerable.
The first reports comes from UNAIDS and the World Bank and concerns five sub-Saharan countries: Kenya, Lesotho, Swaziland, Uganda and Mozambique. The survey was conducted to find out how and where most HIV infections were occurring in each country, and whether existing prevention efforts and expenditure matched these findings.
An IRIN report noted that “In Lesotho, where nearly one in four are living with HIV, an analysis of national prevalence and behavioural data …

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 …

There exists an ageless belief that science is a free-thinking environment where dedicated people happily share information about their work for the goodness and well being of Mankind. Sorry to disappoint the reader, but this is wishful thinking. Distributing and accessing peer-reviewed scientific information might become more difficult as commented elsewhere and for instance this post refers to scientific information available only to the “chosen one”, or those whose employer can afford to pay for it. But what is ironic, is that the subject of this post is itself one …