AIDS/HIV
tsmith | March 23, 2007I have a host of collected links and one-liner posts that I hoped I'd get to this week, but just didn't have the time for. So, rather than let them collect dust any longer, I'll put a number of "greatest hits" in microbiology and public health from the past week or so after the fold:
John McCain isn't sure if condoms help to prevent HIV transmission. Mike and Josh take him down.
The fight against guinea worm, an excruciatingly painful disease, is in the home stretch--but facing one of its toughest obstacles.
The proposed childrens' health study may receive funding after all.
A new…
tsmith | March 13, 2007I was out yesterday, and as such missed Lynn Margulis' blog tour stop at Pharyngula. For those who may not be familiar with Margulis, she's a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was the one who pushed the (now accepted) idea that chloroplasts and mitochondria in cells came about due to symbiosis. In the post announcing her impending arrival, there were lots of questions about her stance on HIV/AIDS. This is mostly due to a review she co-authored on Amazon of Harvey Bialy's biography of HIV denier Peter Duesberg. The review ends: "As both Bialy and Duesberg…
tsmith | February 21, 2007...I'm sure they'll be happy to see that Gambia's president is curing AIDS:
From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient -- a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.
He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.
"Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound…
tsmith | February 2, 2007It's been awhile since I've written about HIV/AIDS denial on here. To be honest, the whole area has just burned me out a bit; it gets tiresome to even discuss issues with people who so fundamentally deny the basic tenets of microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology. But in my absence, there's been quite a bit going on, much of it collected here at the AIDStruth website. However, I have to draw your attention to a notable story today.
The first is like something out of "Law and Order." An HIV-positive man is appealing his conviction in Australia of endangering the lives of three…
tsmith | December 21, 2006Ho ho ho, and welcome to the early Christmas edition of Animalcules. Sit back, grab some hot cocoa, and click below to open your Christmas gift of some of the most interesting microbiology-themed blog posts over the past month.
To start us off with, in a new blog to me (the Cornell Mushroom blog), we learn how a fungus assists in the transmission of a nematode from the environment to the host--in this case, cattle. It's a fascinating example of commensalism.
From the same blog comes another post on Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (or Bd), a fungus which is a cause of skin infections in…
tsmith | December 19, 2006 Libya to execute HIV medics
(Previous posts on the topic)
A court convicted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor Tuesday of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV and sentenced them to death, despite scientific evidence the youngsters had the virus before the medical workers came to Libya.
The United States and Europe reacted with outrage to the verdict, which prolongs a case that has hurt Libya's ties to the West. The six co-defendants have already served seven years in jail.
The sentence brought cheers in Libya, where there is widespread public anger over the infections.…
tsmith | December 14, 2006Today's New England Journal of Medicine has an article (free access) with more information on the Tripoli Six, who are still awaiting their December 19th verdict.
tsmith | December 13, 2006If the last circumcision post caused a lot of heat, this news is likely to cause even more of an uproar worldwide. From NBC News comes word that the NIH will be announcing shortly that they're stopping two trials looking at circumcision and HIV in Africa, because the intervention group (those who were circumcised) show far less HIV infections than the uncircumcised men:
NBC News has learned that the National Institutes of Health will announce at Noon ET Wednesday that two clinical trials in Africa have been stopped because an independent monitoring board determined the treatment was so…
tsmith | December 8, 2006As I've been busy this week, other Sciencebloggers (with Revere leading the fray and more posts here) have updated everyone on the newest developments in the case of the Tripoli Six (previous update here), the six medical workers on trial for their lives in Libya, accused of spreading HIV to more than 400 children in a hospital there. Nature's Declan Bulter broke news on a new Nature paper showing, using molecular phylogenetics, that the strains of HIV which infected the children were already circulating in the hospital prior to the medics' arrival--again, showing that these workers are…
tsmith | November 10, 2006Scienceblogs' coturnix is hosting this month's edition of Carnival of Pozitivities, collecting posts on HIV/AIDS from around the blogosphere. Check it out for a number of excellent posts, including this post on HIV, senior citizens, and how politics affects HIV education.
tsmith | October 3, 2006Orac has a post up on this new JAMA paper as well. He brings up some better examples than the one I gave:
Does anyone in this day and age still believe that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer? The epidemiological evidence of the association is bulletproof. However, the majority of smokers don't get lung cancer. In fact, there are complex statistical models that allow a pretty accurate calculation of risk in populations based on how long and how much a smoker has been smoking. For example, if you start smoking at age 18 and smoke two packs a day, by age 55, you have about a 5% chance of dying…
tsmith | October 2, 2006Ah, another day, another paper for the anti-HIV establishment to glom onto and misrepresent.
Last week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association published this paper examining the relationship between HIV load and CD4 T-cell decline:
Context Plasma human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA level predicts HIV disease progression, but the extent to which it explains the variability in rate of CD4 cell depletion is poorly characterized.
Main Outcome Measures The extent to which presenting plasma HIV RNA level could explain the rate of model-derived yearly CD4 cell loss, as…
tsmith | September 22, 2006The more I read about this, the worse it gets. In addition to the links I mentioned yesterday, Laurie Garrett mentioned she's been covering this for years. One example is this piece from this past June.
One of the newly charged Bulgarians, Smilian Tachev, an engineer, told Bulgarian journalists last month that he was originally arrested in Benghazi at the same time as the nurses and doctor, and during 174 days of captivity witnessed gruesome torture of the health care workers.
"The nurses were beaten with many-stranded wire, for a long time and painfully," Tachev said. "Then they were…
tsmith | September 21, 2006I write a lot here about science denial, and it's been pointed out previously that denying that HIV causes AIDS, for instance, is deadly quackery. Now, via Nature write and blogger Declan Butler and Nature magazine comes news of another form of science denial revolving around HIV: the 7-year imprisonment and torture of six medical workers in Libya (the "Tripoli six"), falsely accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV. In his blog post, Butler asks, "Can the blogosphere help free the Tripoli six?"
(More below...)
This mess began back in 1999, and now the six face…
tsmith | September 12, 2006Via Orac comes Skeptico's takedown of Barnes' numerous misuses and abuses of logical fallacies he claims the "HIV orthodoxy" employs. For a lawyer, he sure hasn't had much training in logic, it would seem.
tsmith | September 10, 2006In the comments to this post on creationists'/HIV deniers' (mis)use of statistics, several people have been trying to argue that because overlapping membership in the two groups is limited, my comparison of the two is false. I explained:
It's the *tactics* that are the same in both groups: misleading use of statistics as evidenced in this post, cherry-picking the lit, appeals to authority, grand conspiracies imagined, painting scientists as greedy and hopelessly biased, quote-mining, hell, they even each have their own prizes based on an impossible standard of evidence.
Michael replied:
Oh…
tsmith | September 4, 2006Regular readers are very familiar with my refrain that many science deniers use the same tactics: bad arguments, quote-mining, appeals to authority, castigation of originators of respective theories, etc. etc. Another common thread is the complete bastardization of statistical analysis. Mark Chu-Carroll elaborates on Peter Duesberg's misuse of statistics here, while mathematician John Allen Paulos destroys creationist/ID analysis here. I'll highlight some of the best parts below:
For those of you who are familiar with creationist/ID arguments, you know that they take an event (say, the…
tsmith | September 4, 2006Last week I mentioned how poverty and poor health go hand-in-hand. The United Nations is well aware of this fact, and has a number of lofty goals they're encouraging countries all over the world to work toward:
Goal 1. Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger
Goal 2. Achieve Universal Primary Education
Goal 3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
Goal 4. Reduce Child Mortality
Goal 5. Improve Maternal Health
Goal 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases
Goal 7. Ensure Environmental Sustainability
Goal 8. Develop a Global Partnership for Development
I also wrote previously how many…
tsmith | August 26, 2006If you're interested in biology and not reading Sandra Porter's Discovering Biology in a Digital World, you should be. As she notes in her profile, her passion is "developing instructional materials for 21st century biology," and it shows--she provides all kinds of little online experiments you can run yourself, even with minimal knowledge of molecular biology. She's recently finished a 4-part series on HIV. The experiment in a nutshell, as she notes:
We are going to compare a protein sequence from a wild type, drug-sensitive, HIV virus with protein sequences from HIV samples that were…
tsmith | August 25, 2006Seed's Jacob Klein has a video up from his time at the AIDS conference last week: link. It includes short interviews with Kay and Rick Warren, evangelical Christians and founders of Saddleback Church, the grandaddy of all mega-churches. (Warren is also the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, which I've admittedly not read). It's interesting to hear their views, but as noted in this SF Gate article, there's still a lot of skepticism about their motivations and methods. (For example, while they discuss treatment and dealing the HIV, they don't pass out condoms, and their ABC's emphasize "…