compiled by Bruce Wainwright and Martin Flynn
US Vice-President’s HIV blind-spot
Vice-President Dick Cheney has come under fire from US HIV groups after admitting, during a televised debate with Democratic candidate John Edwards, he was “unaware” HIV disproportionately affected African-American women.
Linney Smith, of New York’s Housing Works, said: “It’s outrageous. Vice-President Cheney has no idea that black women are dying of Aids in America and it’s outrageous that Senator Edwards failed to address this gaffe.”
Britain boosts grants to India and Global Fund
The UK will grant £123 million over three years to help Indian efforts to tackle its growing HIV and Aids epidemic, DFID Minister Gareth Thomas announced in Delhi earlier this month.
He also announced that the British government was doubling its contribution to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria over the next three years to £150 million.
Mr Thomas said India has the second highest number of HIV infections in the world, estimated at 5.1 million and behind only South Africa, and now accounts for 70 per cent of HIV in Asia.
Chaining HIV+ Indians‘cruel to be kind’
The chaining of HIV positive drug users in the north-eastern Indian state of Manipur, to prevent them from escaping, has been defended as “being cruel to be kind.”
Pauthan Kam, director of a drug care centre in Churchandpur, said that 20 of the 100 men at the centre were HIV positive, the majority were drug addicts and drugs are easily available in the area.
“If they get free for 30 minutes, they succumb, so we put love chains around their ankles to help them overcome the suffering. It’s not against human rights.”
Porn makers fined
for unsafe videos
Two Los Angeles porn film companies have been fined $30,000 for contravening state health and safety laws and allowing actors to have sex on screen without using condoms.
“I have American blood products in me - why don’t you give me a public inquiry?”
Hep C/HIV coinfected protestor outside the new Scottish parliament.
“I was the first child diagnosed as HIV positive in Sheffield. The doctors didn’t expect me to live beyond the age of ten. I have surprised a lot of people and
I proved a lot wrong.”
Claire McKay.
“Some believe sexual health issues to be some kind of Pandora’s Box of sins unleashed on a permissive society. It’s time to destigmatise sexual health and properly deal with what is and will continue to be a very real consideration for public health.”
Baroness Joyce Gould, chair of the Independent Advisory Group for Sexual Health and HIV.
“We only have two or three deaths a month in people with HIV or Aids at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital now compared with over 100 a month in the early 1990s. The deaths are now occurring in people who won’t take therapy or who believe that carrot juice works better.”
Professor Brian Gazzard.
“The WHO’s ‘3 by 5’ initiative [to get 3 million people on anti-HIV drugs by 2005] is an ambitious goal and it is unlikely we’ll reach it.”
Dr George Schmid of the World Health Organisation.
“With our country’s teen pregnancy rates nearly twice that of any industrial nation and at least three million teens acquiring a sexually transmitted disease each year, can we really assume that not teaching our children about safer sex is the best approach?”
Dr Laura Berman, in the Chicago Sun-Times.
