Electronic Gay Community Magazine
AIDS/HIV: On the frontline
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These programs have been found to routinely teach medically inaccurate information about contraception and HIV/AIDS and mandate teaching that sex outside of a heterosexual marriage “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” In April 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services released a federally funded report conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. that found that these programs have no impact, as youth who participated in these programs showed no difference in either the age they first had sex or in the number of partners from those who had not participated in an abstinence-only until marriage program.
To Western scientists and medical researchers, Salome is a human specimen of potentially incalculable value. Despite plying her trade for more than two decades in a country ravaged by AIDS, she has never contracted HIV, and every credible study of her case points towards her being immune to it.
A report released and commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirms that federally funded “abstinence-only” sex education programs simply do not work. In fact, out of the 2,000 youth who took part in this longitudinal study, those who participated in abstinence-only programs were no more likely to abstain from sex than their peers who did not participate. This study is the latest in a series of research confirming that abstinence-only programs not only don't work, but also present youth with dangerous misinformation that could put them at increased risk for sexually transmitted diseases.
Senators Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) reintroduced the Early Treatment for HIV Act (ETHA), a bill that will save lives by allowing states to provide Medicaid coverage to low-income, HIV-positive Americans. Currently a person with asymptomatic HIV infection is not eligible for Medicaid until he or she has progressed to AIDS. Without Medicaid coverage, many low-income Americans are left without the critical care and medication needed to help slow the progression of the HIV. Only after developing AIDS does Medicaid coverage become available.
A hard-to-treat strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been found in four gay men in Washington's King County, and authorities fear it could spread to more.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) is holding up renewal of the Ryan White Act, the law which funds most HIV/AIDS campaigns across the country, and some health care workers in the field suggest that her expected presidential bid may have something to do with it.
We’ve learned a lot about AIDS in the past 25 years since it was first documented in the U.S. among gay men and then intravenous drug users. Virologists have chronicled HIV’s fiendish ability to attack the immune system from within. We’ve all seen how the virus propagates along the fault lines of stigma and poverty. But no one has yet really figured out where HIV comes from—until now.
Driving home from Santa Fe, Mike Zuniga was compelled to pull over to the side of the road. It took a while to process his thoughts on that November day in 1993 - the day a doctor told him he had HIV - so he called a close friend on his cell phone to talk before finishing the drive. "It was a real shocker," said Zuniga, now 36. "I actually ended up in the hospital" due to the stress of learning he was HIV-positive. In 1993, HIV treatment was more harsh, and sufferers had a shorter lifespan.
Gay men who are HIV-positive rarely regret revealing their health status to others, according to a new Ohio State University study. The study, the first of its kind, could be important for clinicians who work with HIV-positive men who are often uncertain whether to tell friends, family, co-workers or others about being diagnosed with the virus that causes AIDS. |
