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 …

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 …

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 …

The BBC reports on South African Children as young as 15 shooting up with grounded HIV anti-retrovirals sometimes mixed with painkillers and marijuana.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked at first, these were school boys in their school uniforms,” documentary-maker Tooli Nhlapo told the BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.
“They take a pill and grind it, until it is a powder. Some also mix it with painkillers and others mix it with marijuana,” said Ms Nhlapo. “They showed me how they roll it and smoke it.”
The pills are either bought …