AIDS/HIV
tsmith | June 6, 2006Once again, I'm wrong. I said yesterday that HIV deniers accused scientists of thinking of Robert Gallo as a deity. Silly, silly me--my mistake. Turns out he's just a high preist:
We point to this phenomenon of how easily religious belief triumphs over the most irrefutable evidence to the contrary, in order to challenge all critics of HIV/AIDS to answer this question:
How does this kind of thought-resistant religiosity differ in the slightest from the twenty year adherence of believers in HIV to their favored dogma in the face of similar overwhelming evidence against the belief?
We suggest…
tsmith | June 5, 2006Yesterday, the New York Times op-ed by John Moore and Nicoli Nattrass discussing denial of HIV. They also featured an article suggesting that more human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has occurred than previously thought.
tsmith | June 2, 2006I forgot to mention this before it aired, but earlier this week PBS aired a two-part documentary on HIV, The Age of AIDS. It's very good, and according to the website, you can watch it online beginning at 5PM EST today. There's also a lot of information, interviews, etc. on the PBS website linked above.
tsmith | May 31, 2006 It can't be said often enough that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Moving from physical characteristics--color, bone shape, the form of bacterial cells--to genetic characteristics in order to classify organisms--and infer phylogenies--was a giant advance. That the molecular characteristics confirmed what was known using physical characteristics was a breakthrough, and allowed for more sophisticated analyses of organisms that don't have bones or other easily-observable physical features that allow for simple classification into groups: microbes. I've…
tsmith | May 6, 2006Just a few things that have either been sitting in my drafts box and I know I won't have a chance to get to, or stuff I saw elsewhere that deserves a mention.
Check out this excellent (and hilarious) post by Skip Evans on creationists and boobies.
I've posted previously here about our eagles here in Iowa. Phil at the Bad Astronomy Blog gives links to 2 webcams, where you can watch the nests of eagles or peregrine falcons (another favorite bird of mine). They've shut down the eagle one because the eggs didn't hatch and the parents left the nest, but there's a fluffy white falcon chick (…
tsmith | May 2, 2006I see that Hank's still touting his "Padian found ZERO seroconversions among 176 discordant heterosexual couples over 6 years" line, even after that study was extensively analyzed here (and his ideas about it were shown to be mistaken). At least he's dropped it from 10 years down to 6 years--progress, I suppose. He's now discussing a new MMR report that documents 88 HIV transmission events over a 17-year period in Georgia prisions. Despite the fact that Hank doesn't dispute that these sexual transmission events occurred (noting that the "infectivity is low, low, low"), Hank still ends his…
tsmith | April 3, 2006Occasionally when discussing HIV and folks like Duesberg, etc., I'll get a question along the lines of, "do these people deny the entire germ theory of disease?" Certainly Duesberg has written that he doesn't believe HPV causes cervical cancer, or prions cause kuru, for example, and many of the arguments they make (expecting 100% attack rate in people who are HIV-positive, meeting Koch's postulates as initially outlined, even though no infectious agent does, etc.) would, if applied universally, not allow us to attribute causation to any infectious agent, not just HIV. A recent paper by…
tsmith | April 1, 2006At the risk of starting an infectious cancer/HIV/AIDS fight over at The Loom, I'll point your attention to Carl's post discussing, well, those topics here. He elaborates on a study I mentioned here but didn't delve very much into the science. Zimmer does--check out the link to find out how he relates it to HIV.
tsmith | March 29, 2006From the Bushmeat Task Force:
In Africa, forest is often referred to as 'the bush', thus wildlife and the meat derived from it is referred to as 'bushmeat'. This term applies to all wildlife species, including threatened and endangered, used for meat including: elephant; gorilla; chimpanzee and other primates; forest antelope (duikers); crocodile; porcupine; bush pig; cane rat; pangolin; monitor lizard; guinea fowl; etc.
Some of this can be hunted legally--much of it is not. Though I won't be concentrating on the bushmeat crisis per se (the focus of the Bushmeat Task Force), they note several…
tsmith | March 27, 2006Part One: Introduction to Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses
Part Two: Introduction to Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses continued
Part Three: Bushmeat
Part Four: War and Disease
Part Five: Chikungunya
Part Six: Avian influenza
Part Seven: Reporting on emerging diseases
Part Eight: Disease and Domesticated Animals
Part Nine: The Emergence of Nipah Virus
Part Ten: Monkeypox
Part Eleven: Streptococcus suis
Part Twelve: Salmonella and fish
Part Thirteen: new swine influenza virus detected
Part Fourteen: dog flu strikes Wyoming.
Part Fifteen: Clostridium species.
Part Sixteen:…
tsmith | March 26, 2006Over at Good math, bad math, Mark has a bit more on mathematical modeling. Before anyone screams "witch hunt," please note:
I'll leave the science debate over at Aetiology, where it belongs. But there's definitely a mathematical aspect to this. Professor Culshaw lends her authority as a mathematician to the HIV denialist folks. Does her math support what she's saying?
Alas, no.
Professor Culshaw is not a bad mathematician - quite the opposite. What I can read of her publications shows very solid mathematical work, done extremely well.
The problem is that when she tries to apply the…
tsmith | March 24, 2006Via Stranger Fruit:
Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them.
tsmith | March 23, 2006So, I moved the malaria entry to another post--since all the comments focused on Culshaw's post (noted in the first comment below), might as well have a more focused discussion on it. I'll be back tomorrow with a somewhat related post, but until then, feel free to chat amongst yourselves.
tsmith | March 15, 2006Tim Lambert over at Deltoid notes Dunk malaria day is coming up this Sunday, and has offered to match donations (up to $300 total) readers make to The Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria. Very cool--I'm kicking in a few bucks for a good cause--if you do the same, drop a line at Tim's blog.
tsmith | March 15, 2006This is pretty cool. In the "Innovators" section of this week's Time, several different epidemiologists are profiled--you can read it free through this Sunday. They are:
1. Michael Sadowsky, who has combined good, old-fashioned leg work with robotics to track various strains of E. coli in soil and water.
2. Suneeta Krishan, who is investigating the link between sexism and AIDS in India.
3. Jane Buxton, who is trying to create an evidence-based program for treating drug addicts in Vancouver.
4. Gregory Schultz, who is using his research into wound healing to develop…
tsmith | March 8, 2006One final word on all the HIV stuff for now then I'm taking a break to get in some more interesting subject matter. I've started responding to this comment, but it's getting lengthy so I'm going to start it as a new post below the fold.
Matt,
Regarding being a "left vs. right" issue, who's characterized them as such? Indeed, I mentioned in an interview here that AIDS denial runs the political spectrum. And just because it's a "prevailing paradigm" doesn't mean it's incorrect, or that the left should for some reason rally against it. Aren't progressives supposed to value logic and…
tsmith | February 23, 2006As promised, a discussion on the paper, Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in northern California: results from a ten-year study.
First, let's backtrack a bit and see what's already been said, lest I repeat myself. The little summary below can also catch anyone up who's not up to wading through 250-odd comments. Those who've already done so can skip the quoted parts and scroll down...
[Note: I've uploaded a .pdf of the Padian paper for anyone to access Here.]
Hank Barnes said here about the paper:
1. It was the longest and largest epidemiological study of…
tsmith | February 10, 2006I was the guest on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe last week, a podcast of the New England Skeptical Society. The main topic of the discussion was HIV denial (specifically focusing on Christine Maggiore's story), but we also talked about antibiotic resistance (inculding peptide antibiotics) and skepticism in general. The host was Dr. Steven Novella:
Dr. Novella is an academic neurologist on full-time faculty at Yale University School of Medicine. He is the Author of Weird Science, a monthly column featured in the New Haven Advocate. He is the co-founder and President of the New England…
tsmith | February 10, 2006 Chris has been excoriating Tom Bethell (author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science") over on The Intersection and elsewhere (see, for example, here, here, and several posts here). However, since he's not yet done a takedown on Bethell's chaper on AIDS (titled "African AIDS: a Political Epidemic"), he suggested I have a go at it. Man, I knew the book would be bad, but it reaches a whole new level of terrible.
Bethell's central thesis will be familiar to anyone who's read the anti-HIV arguments by Peter Duesberg and others. As the chapter title suggests, Bethell claims that…
tsmith | January 23, 2006 Two new big stories regarding AIDS: some good, some bad. First, the good. It's been reported that a single-pill, once-a-day AIDS treatment may be available by the end of the year. Though the drug regimen to treat AIDS is less oppressive than it was a decade ago, it's still a difficult and confusing process. Combining drugs has been diffcult--mainly because no single company oned rights to all the drugs needed for an optimal combination. Now, Gilead Sciences (developers of Tamiflu) and Bristol-Myers Squibb have agreed to collaborate and combine 3 drugs into one pill (a New England…