Two articles from BBC Health:
Background Briefings - Aids
Male circumcision significantly reduces the spread of the HIV virus to men, according to research.
Circumcision cuts HIV risk
Uncircumcised men are at a much greater risk of becoming infected with HIV from heterosexual sex than circumcised men, say researchers. They found a man who is circumcised is up to eight times less likely than one who is not to acquire HIV from "straight" sex.
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UN is 18 months behind me on this one.
U.N. urges circumcision in AIDS-hit southern Africa
Scientific American
December 19, 2006
AIDS-stricken Southern African nations should develop a policy of mass male circumcision to fight the disease, the head of the United Nations anti-AIDS agency said on Tuesday. Several recent medical studies have reported circumcision cuts the risk of HIV infection among men by 50-60 percent, and the findings have been backed by UNAIDS. "These (African) countries should now prepare how to introduce circumcision on a large scale," UNAIDS chief Dr. Peter Piot told Reuters. "The science is clear."
I've blogged about the circumcision aspect before, but had never thought about the perils of polygamy versus Western serial infedility. Also the lefties at the UN and Christian fundamentalists turn out to be as bad as each other.
The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight Against Aids By Helen Epstein
Reviewed by Paul Collier
Times Online
July 22, 2007
Aids has been one nightmare too many for Africa: the region is not coping with the pandemic. This marvellous book combines technical expertise with a worm’s-eye view of what is really happening, all delivered with an understated compassion. Its core is a devastating critique of the West’s Aids programmes, which Helen Epstein reveals to be the triumph of rival ideologies over evidence. These opposing principles have fought each other for the $4 billion annual funding now being poured into Aids, and, in the process, have diverted attention from more practical approaches.
Epstein is a young scientist who went to Africa in 1993 to test an Aids vaccine. The vaccine didn’t work: the disease is probably too complicated to be countered in this way. But gradually, Epstein raised her gaze from test tubes to the societies in which Aids was spreading at rates wholly outside the range of experience elsewhere.
Why was it spreading so fast in eastern and southern Africa? Epstein’s explanation sounds convincing and is straightforward. The region combines two practices that greatly increase HIV transmission. Boys are not circumcised, increasing the risk of infection. Informal polygamy is common, with much of the population maintaining a few stable coterminous relationships. Many people are thereby linked into a single network. We now know that HIV is transmitted predominantly in the first weeks after it is caught. If anyone in the network becomes infected through casual sex then the whole network rapidly contracts it. In contrast, serial infidelity, as common in our own society, yields much lower transmission rates. If one spouse gets infected, so will the other, but by the time they sleep with others they are less infectious.
What are the implications for Aids policy? Some behavioural modification is evidently essential, otherwise infection rates explode. But what modifications are critical and realistic? Well, Africans themselves came up with the answer: if you live in an informally polygamous society then it is literally vital not to sleep around or use prostitutes. In 1986, President Museveni of Uganda led a hard-hitting campaign with this message, brilliantly captured by the slogan “Zero Grazing”. It worked: the incidence of HIV declined precipitously as the campaign ran. We know it did, because two comparable and detailed surveys span its duration and show the decline and its explanation: people stopped sleeping around. We are aware of this now, partly thanks to Epstein, but we could have known it a decade ago when it happened.
The reason it took so long is part of a staggering story, which explains why the Zero Grazing campaign was phased out in the early 1990s. It didn’t fit the ideological left at the United Nations or the Christian right in America. The UN wanted condoms and antiretrovirals. The Christians wanted chastity followed by fidelity. The UN hated Zero Grazing because it implied that people should show a degree of sexual restraint. The Christian right hated it because it didn’t imply sufficient restraint. During the 1990s, antiAids funding spiralled but it was channelled through the UN, and these days vast sums also go through the American government. Zero Grazing, and similar approaches that worked by fostering good sense and a recognition of the huge dangers involved in casual sex, were not just ignored, they were crushed by the weight of money going to other, far less effective approaches.
The biases from rival western ideologies were compounded by those of African leaders, with Museveni the heroic exception. President Mbeki of South Africa was so bound up with the imagined demons of western oppression that he went into denial. But his behaviour seems innocuous compared with that of senior health officials from various countries who siphoned off Aids funds on a grand scale. Take Zambia, one of the better-governed countries of Africa (which is why a particularly blatant scam has come to light). The permanent secretary of the Ministry of Health set up his own company to import useless drugs from Bulgaria and then got his ministry to buy them off his company. Or how about the South African NGO, supposedly helping orphans, that spent two-thirds of its $1.5m on building contracts? Or the $53m from the Global Fund that was plundered by Ugandan officials?
A tidal wave of international money may have been directed at the problem of Aids in Africa, but inadequate supervision and policies that are driven by ideology rather than evidence not only lead to wastage, but tempt badly paid officials into cynicism and from there to criminality. Unfortunately, so inadequate are the media in Africa that it is possible for leaders to fool most of the people most of the time. I doubt that Epstein would be surprised to learn that the latest Afro-barometer survey of citizen opinion finds a 70% approval rate of governments’ performance at combating Aids.
The UN and President Bush should not just read Epstein’s book, they should distribute it around Africa.
The scale of the Aids problem in southern and eastern Africa is breathtaking. The region, for instance, contains just 3% of the world’s population, but accounted in 2005 for nearly 40% of all HIV cases. In countries such as Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland, roughly a third of adults are now infected, a rate 10 times higher than anywhere else in the world outside Africa. Circumcision remains a vital weapon in combating the disease: one 2006 study showed that the practice could reduce the risk of HIV transmission by some 50%.
A friend of mine just emailed me the following: Am reading "A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali" - set against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide. It's incredible - all the men are obsessed with sex. A third of the adult population has Aids (not HIV, Aids) but they continue to shag around without condoms, even with their wives, even having had children born HIV positive.
This has prompted me to add to this thread. Gotta love the penultimate sentence below - it's all the West's fault, surprise surprise. And if anyone ever asks you what the mugugudhu tree, mutendo wegudo (dry soil where a baboon has urinated) and a crushed stone called a "wankie" have in common, well - now you know.
"Dry sex" worsens AIDS numbers in southern Africa
Salon.com
By Hank Hyena
Dec. 10, 199
Sub-Saharans' disdain for vaginal wetness accelerates the plague.
Dry, abrasive vaginas are seen as desirable in sexual intercourse in the vast majority of southern African cultures, notes an article in Tuesday's Village Voice. Aversion to moisture in penetration has inflamed the HIV/AIDS epidemic in this region.
Many men and women regard the smell of vaginal secretions as repulsive, the report says, plus they're embarrassed by the noise of wet sex. Dry vaginas that are swollen with friction are also tighter; this pleases the men because it makes them feel larger. One common belief holds that loose, slippery vaginas are evidence of infidelity.
Dry sex promulgates HIV/AIDS in three ways: The lack of lubricant results in lacerations in the delicate membrane tissue, making it easier for the lethal virus to enter. In addition, the natural antiseptic lactobacilli that vaginal moisture contains aren't available to combat sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, condoms break far more easily due to the increased friction.
Sub-Saharan women attain this dryness in various ways. Herbs from the mugugudhu tree are wrapped in a nylon stocking and inserted into the vagina for 10-15 minutes in a procedure that one woman described as "very painful." Mutendo wegudo (dry soil where a baboon has urinated) is a traditional Zimbabwean recipe. A crushed stone called "wankie" is also utilized, reports the Oct. 23, 1998, World African Network, as are potions called chimhandara ("like a virgin" in Shona) and zvanamina ("taste me only" in Ndebele). Shredded newspapers, cotton, salt and detergents are also used.
Young, educated, urban lovers are slowly slipping away from dry sex, but even in the cities, the practice is retained by 50 percent who regard wet intercourse as a Western import that seeks to emasculate men. Overwhelmingly, dryness retains its deadly lock in rural areas, despite attempts by HIV/AIDS activists to save lives through education.
I just heard this woman Elizabeth Pisani on Start The Week. Fascinating, stereotype-busting, truth-seeking, anti-pc. For example, she unhesitatingly names patterns of sexual behaviour in Southern Africa (the tendency for both sexes to have multiple overlapping sex partners, a legacy of polygamy) as being crucial to the spread of HIV there (apparently it's only infectious briefly at the start, so you can shag as much as you want as long as it's not overlapping, and you probably won't pass it on).
She has a website The Wisdom of Whores, and a book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS which I'll get when it comes out in paperback.
And you *have* to watch this video. 2 mins of your life, you won't regret it. Guys, you'll be wanting to send that on to all the girls you know.
More sex equals less HIV: I explain why
Watched it, checked out the blog, read her positive review in The Telegraph (figured if anyone would attack her it would be them, rather than say, The Guardian) and followed her link to: http://midwestteensexshow.com/
It's maybe not a URL you want in your history, but it's actually an excellent public health programme aimed at teenagers. It doesn't pander or preach and it's pretty funny. The 'Date Rape Beer' segment is worth the watch just by itself.
Go Moses!
Pioneering Research Into Healing Power Of Sugar
Medical News Today
22 Jul 2009
A pioneering University of Wolverhampton lecturer has won a £25,000 grant to research the healing effect of sugar on cuts and wounds. Senior Lecturer Moses Murandu grew up in Zimbabwe and his father used granulated sugar to heal wounds and reduce pain when he was a child. But when he moved to the UK, he realised that sugar was not used for this purpose here.
Moses, 43, carried out research into the effect of sugar on patients' wounds on the vascular ward at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, funding the study himself for six months. He has now been awarded the prestigious Fondation Le Lous Scientific Research Innovation Award and £25,000 to enable him to continue his innovative work.
Sugar can be used on wounds such as bed sores, leg ulcers and even amputations. It works because bacteria needs water to grow, so applying sugar to a wound draws the water away and starves the bacteria of water. This prevents the bacteria from multiplying and they die. Moses found that a 25% sugar concentration ensures the microorganisms cannot survive.
The sweet science
BBC
15/10/09
So far 21 patients have been part of his pilot scheme since January 2009. According to Moses he says nearly all have seen an improvement in their condition.
"One of the ladies we treated had had her right leg amputated above the knee and it wasn’t healing properly because of poor circulation," he says, "but that changed when we started using sugar. "Without the sugar she would have had to have had more of her leg amputated."
Once the wound is cleaned, he packs it completely in sugar and then applies a dressing. Typically Moses says this treatment would cost about £1.49 each time whereas a compression and fluid draining machine costs hundreds of pounds to hire.
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