A recent survey of people living with HIV in the United Kingdom found that over half would participate in a clinical study to develop a cure for HIV despite this posing a risk to their health.
Science shows that thinking about sexuality in a binary fashion of hetero/homosexual is no longer accurate. Rather, evidence shows that there is a diversity of human sexuality and sexual orientations.
Sexual orientation is more complicated than X and Y chromosome. Epigenetics has a greater role to play.
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Attitudes and laws about homosexuality are not purely a colonial import. Since independence, other factors, including right-wing evangelism, have driven anti-LGBTI attitudes.
Criminalisation does little to change behaviour, while actively contributing to increased stigma.
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Homosexuality remains illegal in 38 of 55 African nations. This is concerning from ethical and human rights perspectives. It’s also a serious public health risk.
HIV positive t-shirts have been distributed to reduce the stigma attached to the disease. This would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.
Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters
Novel research in South Africa has found way to test for HIV drug resistance in a cheap and accessible way.
Since the start of the new millennium, South Africa has had to contend with an HIV epidemic and a set of confused policies to address it.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
South Africa’s maternal mortality rate rose dramatically after 1998, almost doubling to 302 deaths per 100,000 live births by 2009.
Needle exchanges don’t put more syringes on the streets. In this photo a clean syringes chart is shown at the Aids Center of Queens County needle exchange outreach center in New York in 2006.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The technology HIV testing has evolved since 1985. And so too have our perceptions about what a positive HIV test means.
Along with governments, doctors, and infectious disease experts, the media have a duty to help halt the spread of Ebola with responsible reporting.
EPA/OLIVIER HOSLET
Time magazine has named health workers caring for Ebola victims in West Africa as its “Person of the Year 2014” and compared them to “military special forces who volunteered to fight the epidemic when…
Making waves but will it cross the pond?
Maurizio Gambarini
The latest report from Public Health England revealed that there were more than 100,000 people living with HIV in the UK, with 6,000 new infections last year. Around a quarter of people are unaware they…
Effective treatment, but no cure yet.
Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters
HIV has infected over seventy million people but only one of them has been cured: Timothy Ray Brown. An HIV-positive resident of Berlin, Germany, Brown developed relapsed leukemia in 2006. To treat the…
Ebola isn’t the only disease we need to worry about.
Jason Reed/Reuters
Some experts worry that the Ebola crisis is diverting attention and resources away from neglected diseases with a substantially larger disease incidence.
By sharing their insights and knowledge, African leaders can improve health throughout the world.
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Ebola has focused the world’s attention on the challenges of health care in Africa. The continent has 11% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s disease burden. It also has just 1.3% of the global…
Director, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital and Consultant Physician, Department of Infectious Diseases, Alfred Hospital and Monash University, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity
Professor of medicine and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand