tagged w/ AIDS
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Controlling the spread of HIV, the viral precursor to AIDS, is daunting but essential to getting the as-yet incurable epidemic under control. UC San Diego biochemist Leor Weinberger came up with a novel approach to the problem: he and his colleagues at San Diego and UCLA have engineered a particle that piggybacks on the virus as it moves between individuals and then competes with it once they're both inside a cell.
LINK : http://news.discovery.com/tech/fight-aids-virus-with-a-virus-110324.htmlControlling the spread of HIV, the viral precursor to AIDS, is daunting but essential... more
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The antigay Westboro Baptist Church has threatened to picket the funeral of actress, AIDS activist and LGBT icon Elizabeth Taylor, who died Wednesday at the age of 79.
E! Online reports on the Westboro announcement that could prove to be an empty threat, if the past offers any indication. Despite promises to picket the funerals of Heath Ledger and Natasha Richardson, the Kansas-based group failed to appear.
Maggie Phelps, daughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder and pastor Fred Phelps, tweeted, "No RIP Elizabeth Taylor who spent her life in adultery and enabling proud f-gs. They cuss her in hell today. #Westboro will picket funeral!"
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that Westboro’s pickets at the funerals of American soldiers are protected by the First Amendment. The church says the deaths represent divine retribution for the country’s tolerance of LGBT people.
According to E! Online, it remains unclear where Taylor will be laid to rest.The antigay Westboro Baptist Church has threatened to picket the funeral of actress,... more
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A slutty Steamboat Fritz cat named Smutley performs freaky and unspeakable acts of a sexual nature upon a variety of species to the tune of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” in the name of AIDS prevention.
Brilliant!A slutty Steamboat Fritz cat named Smutley performs freaky and unspeakable acts of a... more
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A doubling of new HIV infections in the UK in the past decade is leading experts to tell GPs to offer testing to all adult male patients in some areas.
Health Protection Agency data shows new UK-acquired cases rose from just under 2,000 in 2001 to nearly 3,800 in 2010.Men who have sex with men remain the group most at risk of becoming infected with HIV. New diagnoses in this group alone have increased by 70% in the past 10 years. There are more than 30,000 men who have sex with men living with HIV in the UK and experts estimate nearly a third of these are currently undiagnosed and unaware that they are infected.Another high risk group that would benefit from increased HIV testing, according to NICE, is the black African community living in England. In 2009, more than 2,000 black Africans were diagnosed with an HIV infection; one-third of all new diagnoses in the UK.Routine testing for HIV should be offered to all patients, regardless of age or ethnic background, who are registering with a GP, taking a blood test or being admitted to hospital in these areas, NICE says. The aim is to avoid stigmatising the groups with the highest incidence of the disease – gay men and black Africans.The lifetime cost of treating someone with HIV is almost £320,000 and the HPA says the NHS could have saved £1.2 billion if all 3,780 cases infected in the UK in 2010 had been prevented.There were 65,319 people known to be living with HIV in the UK in 2009. However, surveillance of blood samples given in hospital tests for other conditions suggests the true number living with the virus was 86,500.
Sources: The Independent and BBCA doubling of new HIV infections in the UK in the past decade is leading experts to... more
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There's a new technique to prevent the transmission of the HIV virus among young women in Africa approved by the World Bank: pay monthly these girls to let them go to school. In this way the girls decide to broke up with their older partners, often HIV positive, because they do not need money anymore.
http://www.inaltreparole.net/en/world/unfissomensilecontroglisugardaddies200311.htmlThere's a new technique to prevent the transmission of the HIV virus among young... more
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In episode 44 of MicrobeWorld Video filmed at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Washington, D.C., Dr. Stan Maloy talks with Beatrice Hahn, Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, about her work on the origins of HIV and Malaria, and how these diseases may have spread to humans.In episode 44 of MicrobeWorld Video filmed at the American Association for the... more
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On the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, read what LGBT rights activist and playwright Larry Kramer had to say about Reagan shortly after his death in 2004.
By Larry Kramer
COMMENTARY: The following piece was originally published in The Advocate issue dated July 6th, 2004.
Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even. In all the tributes to his passing, as I write this two days after his death, not one that I have seen has mentioned this. The hateful New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”) of course said nothing about this. We still are not fit to write about with total honesty in their pages. Not really. Just as we were not fit for Ronald Reagan to talk about us. What kind of president is that?
I have been writing a long work of history which I call The American People. I chose this title because in every speech he ever made, Reagan went on and on about “the American People.” We of course were never a part of his American People. And we knew it. Year after year of his hateful and endless reign we knew we were not a part of the American People he was President of. He would never talk about us, of course, or do anything for us except murder us. There were no social services for us. There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies. How could he not have seen us dying? The answer is he did see us dying and he chose to do nothing. There was no representation in his government of us. There was never anything for us but his ignoble dismissal of us. All of Washington, indeed the world, knew that Reagan hated us. How could they not? Most of them did, too. And when Daddy doesn’t love you, who is there who will stand up to Daddy? This is a trick that Hitler used and which I believe the young Reagan learned from him. He never had to say much out loud himself about his hatreds; but everyone knew what they were. Gays were as hated under Reagan as Jews were under Hitler. It is a trick that both George Bushes have carbon-copied. We have not been included among their American people either.
I could never understand why Reagan’s hatred of us was so intense and manifest and never-ending. Some of Nancy Reagan’s best friends were gay, the self-loathing Jerry Zipkin, at one time her principle “walker,” chief among them. It is said he taught her how to dress. In my play, Just Say No, I dramatized my own theory of why she and her husband kept gays off their agenda as if we were the plague, which of course, as in some hideous self-fulfilling prophecy, we became. Ron Reagan, Jr. That is why. It was no secret in an ever-widening circle that Ron Reagan, Jr. was suspected of being gay. In his freshman year at Yale (I believe this was his only year there; perhaps there were two), I have been told he had numerous gay experiences. I am well known at Yale. Indeed, I have established the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale to document the evil acts that American “history” has performed on us.
And just as damning of the son’s reputation, of course, because it could not be hidden, was that Ron Reagan, Jr. was a ballet dancer. This did not look good and was obviously exceedingly embarrassing to a father who rode so many horses. So off with the tutu and on with a wedding ring. Junior was married off and sent to far-off places in positions of low visibility. I have gay friends in Hollywood, equally closeted, who knew him and know him and protect him. To know him is to be sworn to some sort of pact of secrecy. What a hideous life Ron, Jr. must have led all these years. To be denied a life and to have been so utterly gutless about fighting back. (Well, we know all about that.) While his own mother was gallivanting around with some of the biggest fairies in the world. What hateful parents to have had in the prime of your life, “the great communicator” of a father out there communicating how much he hated you and his wife out there going along with this. I suspect by now Ron Reagan, Jr. actually believes he is straight. By now he may very well be. He may well have been all along. He just looked so suspicious, and of course it was this perceived suspicion that, one way or the other, is what caused his father to murder so many of us. Why does history not recognize this monstrous and never-ending history of hatred and the inestimable number of deaths it continues to cause?
People magazine called me for a quote Reagan’s death. “I wish he had died before he was elected” is what I told them. I wonder what they will run.
It is remarkable that two of the so-called “greatest presidents” have also allowed the greatest perpetrations and perpetuations of mass murder. Franklin D. Roosevelt was shamefully inept in dealing with “the Jewish question,” (see my play The Normal Heart), most ironically since so many Jews were his most loyal supporters, the Jerry Zipkins of their day. No one really writes about this. Roosevelt is one of history’s great gods. Just as no one really writes about Reagan and “the gay question.” These two major murderers so far have gotten away with helping to cause the two major holocausts of modern history. Just as Jews are asked to never forget their Holocaust, I implore all gay people never to forget our holocaust and who caused it and why. Ronald Reagan did not even say the word “AIDS” out loud for the first seven years of his reign. Because of this, some 70 million people, so far, have become infected with HIV/AIDS. I wonder what it feels like to be the son and the wife of a man responsible for over 70 million people so far becoming infected with a virus that has killed over half of us so far. I wonder what it felt like while he was alive to ponder this. For surely he must have thought about it. How could he not? He has been called the consummate actor who came to believe all his lines. Does this not make his legacy even more grotesque? It should.
Hitler knew what he was doing. How could Ronald Reagan not have known what he was doing?
But of course, no one is writing about this. Reagan too is one of history's gods.
So far he has gotten away with murder.On the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, read what LGBT rights activist... more
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Human Bacteria In The Production Of Human Cancer
A Short Report With Photographic Evidence
© 2011 Alan Cantwell MD
One of the most remarkable medical findings in the new 21st century is the recognition that 90% of the cells that make up our body are not human cells. On the contrary, most of our cells are the trillions of microbial cells (primarily bacteria) that inhabit our bodies and share our lives. According to microbiologist Brett Finlay: "We really are a superorganism. From the moment we are born until we die, we live in a symbiotic relationship with our microbes."
The National Institutes of Health has launched a $115-million Human Microbiome Project to identify, analyze and catalog the hundreds of microbial species residing in or on the human body. Modelled after the Human Genome Project, which decoded most of the human genes in the 1990s, the goal of the microbiome project is to determine which microbes are harmful and to figure out ways to prevent or treat diseases they cause.
continued @ http://www.rense.com/general92/cantw.htmHuman Bacteria In The Production Of Human Cancer
A Short Report With Photographic... more
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The drug whoonga is said to be so addictive that users are hooked within days of starting to smoke it. Whoonga is a mixture of rat poison, detergent and marijuana and the key ingredient - crushed antiretroviral (ARV) medication prescribed to people with HIV - which is smoked in a joint to get high.Demand for the substance has prompted a massive wave of thefts of Aids drugs across the country.The street-value of the powder is ca 30 rands (about £3) per packet.Not only is the drug extremely toxic and has lead to the death of scores of addicts across South Africa during the past year, it is also leading to the death of innocent HIV patients. Because the ARV drugs are the essential to the concoction scores of Aids patients are being robbed of their antiretroviral drugs every week - some even being killed for their lifesaving ARV drugs. Sithenjwa Nyawose, an ANC councillor in Durban, said: "The patients are being mugged for their drugs. They are violently attacked in the streets as they leave the clinics."In Johannesburg, a police officer was implicated this month in a cartel that has targeted health clinics to steal ARVs.Doctors say the prescription medication does not contain anything that could deliver a "high", even when smoked.The country's Treatment Action Campaign, an Aids lobbying group, has described the belief that the drugs have recreational value as a "myth".The drug whoonga is said to be so addictive that users are hooked within days of... more
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AIDS is a plague allowed to happen
AC360
By Larry Kramer, Special to CNN
January 14, 2011 1:20 p.m. EST
Editor's note: Watch "Hope Survives: 30 Years of AIDS," an AC360° special, at 9pm ET Friday. Larry Kramer co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis and founded ACT UP, an activist organization that has campaigned for treatments for HIV/AIDS. His play, "The Normal Heart," about the early years of AIDS and directed by Joel Grey, will be produced on Broadway by Daryl Roth and will star Joe Mantello; it will also be filmed next summer starring Mark Ruffalo and directed by Ryan Murphy. "The American People," his novel about the history of homosexuals in America, will be published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. Kramer, whose partner is David Webster, is HIV+ and the recipient of a liver transplant.
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New York City (CNN) -- I want this article to break your heart. But it deals with a subject that has had a tough time of it in the break-everyone's-heart department. I'll bet that a number of you will be more angry at me than sympathetic by the time you finish reading it. If indeed you finish reading it.
From its very beginning, most people have not wanted to know the truths about AIDS. This is an indisputable fact that continues until this very minute. I have been on the front lines since Day 1, so I know what I'm talking about.
Here are 10 realities about AIDS, and I've learned them the hard way:
1. AIDS is a plague -- numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health -- though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.
2. Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects, gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.
3. Likewise, both people who don't have sex the way they do (if they have it at all) and people who take drugs in order to feel better in a world that they find wretched are considered two highly expendable populations by the powerful forces that control this world.
4. AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.
5. It is a plague that is not going to go away. It is only going to get worse.
6. There is no cure and the amount of money expended toward finding one is pathetically small, miniscule, puny, and totally indicative of a system and a government and a country and a world that does not want to end this plague.
7. There is no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to find a cure since they are making billions selling, at highly inflated prices, the many anti-viral drugs that those infected must consume -- drugs that only keep us living but still infected just enough to continue to possibly still infect others.
8. Educational campaigns, indeed all attempts at prevention, have been too stupid, useless, lily-livered, and nicey-nicey to accomplish much of anything.
9. There is no one of any use really in charge of this plague, in America or anywhere else in the world -- and it is a worldwide plague by now -- and this lack of decent, responsible and humane leaders has been so since its beginning in 1981. They lie to us. I consider most of those who have been or are in charge as equal to murderers.
10. One out of every five men who have sex with men in America is now HIV-positive, and more than 50% of gay men do not know it. Doctors in Chelsea say the statistics for that New York neighborhood have jumped from one out of five to one out of four. At the rate things are going, almost all gay men in America could be HIV-positive, which a lot of people would really like to see happen.
These are appalling statistics, appalling statements, appalling facts, and yet no one responds to them when I raise them. Why should they? Too many people want too many other people dead, and it is fearful and as we continue to see over and over, often dangerous to confront them.
30 years of HIV -- Three men reflect
Governments and bureaucrats and presidents and politicians and the people who run this world lie to people. They tell us HIV is under control. They tell us case numbers are decreasing. They tell us that all is being done that can be done. They tell us HIV is too complicated to eradicate. They tell us gay people and people of color have made more progress than ever before. These are all lies.
We must not believe them. How could we when, in one place or another:
-- They also tell us we can't get legally married.
-- They also tell us that we cannot legally adopt children.
-- They also tell us religions will not recognize us.
-- They also tell us we can't serve our country yet.
-- They also tell us our real history cannot be taught in schools.
-- They also tell us that gay students cannot organize in schools.
-- They also tell us that people who murder us are not committing hate crimes.
-- They also tell us we cannot insure our partners.
-- They also tell us our partners are not legal.
-- They also tell us we cannot have equal opportunities.
-- They also tell us we can't kiss each other or hold each other's hands in public.
-- They also tell us that our Supreme Court doesn't want to know about any of this, doesn't want to make us free and equal, doesn't want to honor the Bill of Rights.
If you want to know why AIDS is a plague, I have just told you why.
I could add a thousand more "they also's." I could expound and expand and add so many facts and figures to the above they'd put you to sleep. I helped start the two major AIDS organizations in America. I have watched almost everyone I once knew die.
For some 30-plus years, I have been trying to tell the world where this plague came from and why, and I will continue to do so until I die, too.
You see, I simply can't get the memories and the ghosts of just about every friend I had out of my life. And since there is no doubt in my mind that this plague of HIV/AIDS that took them from me was and continues to be allowed to happen, I am duty bound to tell this hideous history as best and as fully as I can. It's the least I can do.
That is correct: This plague of HIV/AIDS was intentionally allowed to happen. It still is. Nothing has changed in the intentionality department. Hate has a way of hanging around forever and too often winning out in the end.
The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Larry Kramer.AIDS is a plague allowed to happen
AC360
By Larry Kramer, Special to CNN
January... more
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13 times, I have cycled 7 days, 575 miles, from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a cycling charity event called AIDSLifecycle. In route to Los Angeles, I (and 2,000 of my best friends) cycle thru Montecito, CA. ( Montecito is the home to Oprah Winfrey).
Each Year, the locals of Montecito - Santa Barbara gather and create their own "Paradise Pit Stop" for the approx. 2,000 AIDSLifecycle Cyclist & 400 Volunteer Crew members. There you can find: chocolate bars, organic strawberries, vegan ice cream, corn dogs, Twinkies, coco cola, massages, and then some.. ... ALL YOU CAN EAT ...GRATIS!
Years ago (as I ate my strawberries and homemade ice cream), I asked several Montecito residents: "Where is Oprah?"
http://ynottony.com/oprah.php13 times, I have cycled 7 days, 575 miles, from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a... more
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The associated press reported that the U.S. teen birth rate in 2009 fell to its lowest point in almost 70 years of record-keeping. "Experts" are reported to believe the declined in teen birth statistics is partly due to the recession.
The birth rate for teenagers fell to 39 births per 1,000 girls, ages 15 through 19, according to a government report released Tuesday. It was a 6 percent decline from the previous year, and the lowest since health officials started tracking the rate in 1940.
More info: http://he-ed.blogspot.com/2010/12/heed-share-does-recession-effect-your.htmlThe associated press reported that the U.S. teen birth rate in 2009 fell to its lowest... more
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