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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 …
Continue reading World AIDS Day: Looking Back
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.…
Continue reading Let’s Hear it For Science! Why Some People Are Immune to AIDS
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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Continue reading Shame as a Public Health Issue
via the Salt Lake Tribune
The Utah Senate committee unanimously passed SB155, a law which will allow third-degree felony charges to be brought against sex workers who have tested positive for HIV. Usually, sex work is prosecuted as a misdemeanor in Utah, but there is a mechanism to amp it up to a felony if the defendant is HIV-positive and “knowingly sells or solicits sex acts.” The process for doing that was so difficult that it rarely happened, so they came up with this new law to make it easier.
I fully understand the desire to slow the spread of HIV. And at the same time, I can easily imagine this law having the exact opposite result because it creates a disincentive for sex workers …
Continue reading When Politicians Create Disincentives for HIV Testing & Safer Sex Among Sex Workers
A few days ago, I was following a Twitter conversation between @AlexaRPD and @audaciaray about the issue of mandatory disclosure of HIV status to sexual partners. In part, it was sparked by a news story about a sex worker whose arrest for prostitution became a felony rather than a misdemeanor because she’s HIV positive. And these two incredibly intelligent folks were on opposite sides of the question of whether disclosing HIV status should be mandatory (for people in general, not just sex workers).
As is often the case, I can see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, I absolutely agree that if you have a health condition that you could pass along to someone else, you have a moral responsibility to inform …
Continue reading mandatory HIV disclosure? no thanks
There’s been lots more buzz lately about the porn HIV case. Fortunately, there are some places where a more reasonable and informed conversation is taking place. Rather than reiterate it all, here’s a few pointers.
Ernest Greene’s blog, with lots of great comments & discussion: here, here & here. That third link has pointers to some blogs by people who are actually performers in the mainstream het porn world, which gives them much more credibility in my eyes that, say, MSNBC on the topic.
Tony Comstock’s blog, with some very thoughtful input: here & here.
I also recommend pornochromatic, with two very insightful posts here & here. The second one proposes some ways to make the industry safer that seems to …
Continue reading it’s not an outbreak, dammit!
People are still getting riled up around HIV & porn. And two bloggers whose opinions I generally click with have come to two very different places on this issue.
Tony Comstock has some interesting stuff to say about the safety of porn performers and the general lack of response from the sex-positive world. He makes some good points- my experience is that the sex-pos community has generally focused on the experience of watching porn and how it can affect people’s sexualities, rather than talking about the experiences of the people who make porn. And he offers this:
I simply cannot see how the introduction of a camera makes it “sex-positive” for performers to do things that we would decry in any other circumstance. Would a
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Continue reading more perspectives on HIV & porn
From Aidsmap via Carnal Nation
New research in the online journal AIDS shows that more than 50% of HIV transmissions among gay men are from main (as compared to casual) sexual partners and 46% of infections were from partners who thought that they were HIV-negative. That’s pretty scary- lots of people out there are telling their partners that they’re HIV-negative in good faith, without actually realizing that they’re not. This is why you need to get tested regularly, dammit!
Bottoming accounted for 69% of infections, while topping was responsible for an estimated 28% of infections, and oral sex was responsible for 3% of transmissions. Remember- risk reduction doesn’t mean risk-free. Use condoms. Use lube. Get tested.…
Continue reading just because you think you’re HIV-negative…
Four different articles on related topics came across my inbox today.
First, according to MSNBC.com, 3% of Washington DC residents are living with HIV or AIDS. As if that weren’t appalling enough, “almost 1 in 10 residents between ages 40 and 49 are living with HIV, and black men had the highest infection rate at almost 7 percent.” Another MSNBC.com article reports that older folks (50+) are increasingly at risk for HIV, both because erectile dysfunction drugs increase the numbers of people having intercourse and because there’s a lower rate of safer sex practices. To make matters even worse, older women are especially susceptible since the vaginal lining gets thinner with age, and older HIV-positive people have a shorter time from diagnosis to the …
Continue reading more developments in the world of HIV and sex education
The interwebs is buzzing with the news. According to an article published in Nature today, glycerol monolaurate or GML (a common ingredient in cosmetics and medications, as well as a component of breast milk) seems to stop HIV cold.
Before you get too excited, the experiment looked at monkeys and SIV (the monkey equivalent of HIV). They’ll need a lot more testing before they know if it works and is safe for people. But here’s the summary. They took GML, which is already approved by the FDA, and added it to KY Warming Lube, which is also approved by the FDA. They applied it to some monkeys for 5 days and then applied 200 doses of HIV. The control group didn’t get the GML.
Predictably …
Continue reading some good news from the HIV front
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