In an article posted on LifeLube, Charles Stephens wonders what oral prevention and rectal microbicides, amongst others, might mean for HIV prevention and pleasure, risk and taboo.
As “condom-centric” prevention interventions are failing (the intervention, not the condom), hope and expectations are high that other prevention strategies such as PrEP and microbicides could succeed where condoms are failing. However, discussion and debate are rife around these interventions and they are important because we need to think ahead about how they will affect our sexual behaviour.
The problem is “how” to think these …

Another must see talk from the TED conference. The message to take home is that no simplification can be made neither is it valuable to try to make one.
“We hope that when we act on global problems in the future, we will not only have the heart, we will not only have the money, but we will also use the brain”
Hans Rosling
Professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute

The interactive animation in this video is accessible on the Gapminder website.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

In an article for the Pink News, Ramsey Dehani questioned “modern” HIV prevention campaigns asking if they were failing younger generations. Observing that campaigns promoting condom use have more or less disappeared to be replaced by testing campaigns, Dehani noted that many people still die of ignorance and recalled a conversation he had with a 20-year-old gay student who was more concerned about getting gonorrhoea than HIV (statistically speaking, the youg guy in question was rather well informed).
Should HIV prevention campaigns target the blasé attitude of younger generations that have …

The column below is worth reprinting in full with a bit of background. recently started to write a regular piece for the Singapore-based gay website Fridae.com.
After three columns he had successfully alienated most of the Singaporean, Asian and Rice Queen Fridae members by writing against the flow on the subject of HIV prevention amongst MSM. In the instalment preceding the one reprinted below, Jan suggested more oral sex and less anal sex as an addition to the panoply of HIV prevention approaches. In no time he was assaulted from …

Several factors are important in determining if the HIV virus can be passed from an infected person to another person. These include biological and social factors and they relate to both the exposed and the “infector” individuals.
This conceptual framework summarises only the biological factors that influence HIV transmission. When assessing the risk of infection, each of them should be considered in turn and as a whole.

Exposure alone is not enough to predict a risk of infection, viral load maters and though there is no direct correlation between viral load and …