Yearly Archives: 2014

VERVENA, South Africa — A fading roadside ad for Selala Funeral Service here captures what was, until recently, the essence of South Africa’s AIDS epidemic: “Tombstones Are Available,” it reads. “Buy One, Get One Free.”

Not long ago, even places like Vervena, a blip on the roadside northeast of Pretoria, supported several funeral parlors.

But in the last few years, “we’ve managed a miracle,” said Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, one of the country’s leading AIDS researchers. “Undertaking is not a business you want to go into anymore.”

As recently as 2008, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa was out of control, hampered by the indifference of President Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela’s successor. Death was everywhere.

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Thailand’s young people are facing a new rise in HIV infections – the virus that causes AIDS. Researchers say they are finding it tougher to reach at-risk populations with messages about safer sex.

In a report released Monday, UNICEF says 70 percent of all sexually transmitted HIV infection cases in Thailand are occurring among people between the ages of 15 and 24.

The report says despite a gradual drop in the overall prevalence of HIV in the country during the past two decades, new infections are now rising — especially among young people involved in the sex trade, injecting drugs and young men having unprotected sex with men.

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Paige Rawl was 12 years old when she told her best friend that she has HIV. She’s had the virus since birth — her mother unknowingly contracted it from her father, who eventually left the family.

“I didn’t really fully understand what exactly I was telling my friend at the time,” Rawl, now a 19-year-old college student, told me. “I didn’t really understand what having this disease could mean until after I started getting the reactions from other people.”

Those reactions were devastating. Paige’s admission quickly spread through her Indianapolis middle school. Rawl’s schoolmates — even her friends — responded by mocking and ostracizing her. They refused to use the water fountain after her, afraid they’d get the disease, too. She was beat up and called names. Rawl went to the school counselor for help. Her advice to Rawl? Tell her friends that she didn’t have HIV after all.

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In order to slow the spread of HIV, certain people who do not have the virus but are at risk should take medicine to prevent becoming infected. That’s the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and, just recently, the World Health Organization.

The preventive treatment is known as PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Eric McCulley made the decision to start PrEP. He’s 40, gay and HIV-negative. Outside an Atlanta coffee shop, he pulls out a plastic baggy with a few blue pills.

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A new study published by the MAC AIDS Fund shows a third of teens don’t know HIV is a sexually transmitted disease. Have the lessons of generations past been lost?

American teenagers have a relatively clear view of which unhealthy behaviors will put them at greatest long-term risk.

That was my conclusion reading the results of a new survey put out by the MAC AIDS Fund. The online survey of about 1,000 teenagers was conducted this year by the communications firm Kelton, and does reveal some worrisome data about their attitudes and level of information about HIV and AIDS. Given its funding source, it makes sense that those facts would be the focus of the report. But taken as a whole, the results indicate that adolescents have a pretty good understanding of what choices are most likely to worsen their health over time.

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ATLANTA — In the early 2000s, a young researcher at the Centers for Disease Control named Greg Millett set out to solve an epidemiological mystery. Nobody could explain why black Americans, particularly black gay men, had such high rates of HIV infection compared to the rest of the population. How were they putting themselves in so much danger? What were they doing differently from everyone else?

Millett began with a survey of the published research, but that only seemed to raise more questions. Study after study seemed to arrive at the same conclusion: Black gay men take fewer risks in the bedroom than white gay men. They are just as, if not more, consistent about condom use and STD testing. They have fewer sex partners. They are less likely to abuse injection drugs. Despite all this, black men—gay, straight, or bisexual—are 6 times more likely than white men to contract HIV in a given year.

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A new working paper from CHIPTS Policy Core Member and Public Policy associate professor Manisha Shah and her co-author Scott Cunningham of Baylor University has made waves in the media for its groundbreaking research and surprising findings.

“Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health,” explores the results of seven years in Rhode Island’s history during which indoor prostitution was unintentionally decriminalized.

According to news reports, the state’s legislature amended a law in 1980 which created a legal loophole that decriminalized paid consensual sex if it took place privately indoors. This loophole went unnoticed until 2003, when police took a number of prostitutes to court and lost because of this unanticipated interpretation of the law. It wasn’t until 2009 that new legislation was passed to re-criminalize indoor prostitution.

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