World AIDS Day: Looking Back

This post first appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.

I don’t recall when I first heard about AIDS.I was 11 when the first cases were documented by the CDC in 1981, but it took a while before the news percolated down to me. I remember being 12 or 13 and the panic that hit everywhere. Suddenly, there was a sexually transmitted disease (as they were called then) that was killing people and nobody really knew how it spread. The complacency around STIs that penicillin gave us for a few decades suddenly evaporated and freaked out doesn’t even begin to cover it.

There were people who refused to shake hands or even be in the same room as people with AIDS. There were people who …

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12.14.11 | %% Category: sex & culture, sexual health | One comment

Let’s Hear it For Science! Why Some People Are Immune to AIDS

Clipped from: healthland.time.com (share this clip)

One of the big questions in AIDS research has been answered: why do some HIV-positive people never develop AIDS? About 1 in 300 people with HIV are what scientists call “HIV controllers” because their bodies are able to control the virus and keep it from replicating, which means they don’t develop AIDS.

According to new research, the answer is that they have a genetic variation that helps their immune system kill the virus. For folks without this variation (which is most people), the virus is hidden from their immune system, so it can replicate. Although researchers are long way from turning this into a vaccine or other treatment, hopefully it’s a step in that direction.…

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11.08.10 | %% Category: sex research, sexual medicine | One comment

Shame as a Public Health Issue

This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.

For years, safer sex advocates have been saying that self-esteem has a huge effect on how much people engage in risk-reduction and harm-reduction behaviors. That’s why many of the most effective intervention programs & organizations, whether online like Scarleteen.com or in-person like the StopAIDS Project, offer counseling and support, in addition to information.

So I was really interested to read this post on ScienceDaily.com about research showing that among the 1,000 HIV-positive and negative gay and bisexual men surveyed:

Almost 10 percent of the participants reported that they had been victims of childhood sexual abuse and nearly 30 percent had experienced gay-related victimization between the ages of 12 and 14, including verbal insults, bullying,

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07.23.10 | %% Category: sex research, sexual health, sexual medicine, shame | Leave a comment