VisualAIDS

March tomorrow to demand "Healthcare for All"

Turn your Anger into Action! Come out this Thursday and march with us!

Join the CHAMP [Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project] contingent at the ACT UP 20th anniversary demonstration to demand "Healthcare for All".

Meet us in front of the Federal Building at 290 Broadway (at Worth Street):
Tomorrow, Thursday, 3/29/2007 11:30 am

* RALLY outside the Federal Building at 290 Broadway to demand a national health care reform plan from our Congress and President.

* MARCH down Broadway past Wall Street to demand an end to private health insurance.

* CONVERGE at the "Charging Bull" sculpture at Bowling Green to demand price
controls on the medicines that save and extend lives around the world.

See you there!

--
Lei Chou, Director of Mobilization
CHAMP - Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project
32 Broadway, Suite 1801
New York, NY 10004
t. 212.937.7955 x. 4
  www.champnetwork.org

more info:
Universal health care is an AIDS issue. We cannot survive on this broken system of care. Come support ACT UP in launching its two year campaign to put health care at the forefront of the 2008 Presidential campaign agenda.

The current fractured and dysfunctional system of care is failing Americans living with HIV & AIDS:

1. After years of under-funding, the Ryan White CARE Act and the AIDS Drug Assistance Program are straining under the growing demand for care and treatment. Waiting lists for clinic appointments, case management, and AIDS drugs continue to lengthen unabated around the country.

2. An estimated 1/3 of HIV positive Americans who should be on treatment have no access to care. Stringent Medicaid policies are leaving them with no alternatives but to get sick and fall into poverty in order to qualify.

3. AIDS drug prices are being set at record high levels, even when the initial discovery were done by tax-dollar funded research. What's more, companies have been raising their prices at twice the inflation rate annually. The powerful industry lobby have succeeded in prioritizing federal funding for drug costs over other services and care, while forbidding
federal programs from negotiating lower prices.

Frontline, The Age of AIDS: Interview with Dr. Chris Beyrer

via PBS, May 30, 2006 :

Frontline, The Age of AIDS

Watch full program

INTERVIEWS

Interview with Chris Beyrer
Dr. Chris Beyrer has spent his entire professional career, and much of his adult personal life, battling AIDS. As a medical student, he was at the forefront of treating Haitians in Brooklyn, while friends, and his lover, fell ill and died. Beyrer escaped infection -- for which he credits "absolutely religious" use of condoms -- and went on to help Thailand design and implement effective prevention programs, including one that showed "behavioral interventions" and condoms dramatically lowered infection rates in young Thai males. He is currently an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the director of the Johns Hopkins Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program. Here he talks about how Thailand became a rare success story in combating the sexual spread of AIDS, although the country's epidemic among drug users still rages on. He also describes how Burma is central to Asia's AIDS epidemic and why he believes that to successfully fight AIDS, countries need to invest their own resources and not just rely on outside funding. Beyrer worries of ever truly getting ahead of the disease. "For those of us who have watched this happen, to have the same conversation in 2000 with the minister of health that you had in 1995 in another country, and in 1985 with the Reagan administration, is a kind of terribly painful déjà vu. You just always hope that somebody for once is going to say, 'We're going to implement a prevention program right now because we don't have an epidemic, and let's see if we can avoid one,'" he says. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted March 30, 2005.

• Some highlights from this interview
• Why he and his partner initially decided not to get tested
• The role of prisons in spreading HIV
• Thailand's "100 Percent Condom Campaign"
• Why President Bush may leave a "disastrous legacy" on AIDS [excerpted below]

There's no question, if you look just at straight dollars, that the current President Bush has put more money into global AIDS than any of his predecessors, and it is substantial money. He has really pushed for it. It's not been a passive effort; he really has been engaged. I think that the focus on treatment, and the moral obligation for treatment, is important and has had a real impact for people on the ground, or it has the potential to.

On the other hand, treatment is treatment, and you can't confuse it with responding to HIV spread. HIV spread is something else entirely. And as we know, for the most part, HIV spread is driven by people who are recently infected, healthy, asymptomatic, and very unlikely to show up anywhere where there's treatment. There is a disconnect there, but it's just difficult to deal with.

If you look in terms of HIV spread, then we're facing a disastrous legacy, because the string attached to the treatment dollars is limiting evidence-based prevention, is limiting family planning access, has really tied up the anti-abortion position of the conservatives in the U.S. with HIV prevention in such a way as to make our partners unable to respond. Nobody's talking here about supporting or not supporting abortion; we're simply talking about trying to engage with those organizations on the ground in hard-hit countries that do HIV prevention and that also, generally speaking, do family planning. It's not like there are so many services in Africa that you can choose which ones you're going to support and which ones you're not.

The latest target has been harm reduction, so the U.S. is going to every one of the international forum[s] and is actually making quite a bit of headway in forcing international organizations, if they want U.S. dollars, to back off the evidence for prevention in drug users. UNAIDS [Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS] was the most recent one to fall. They have just backed away from supporting harm reduction; they're taking it out of their language of best practices. At this point I think it's fair to say that only two international organizations have even tried to withstand the Bush administration pressure. And I should say it's not just the Bush administration; it's Congress. ...

But those two organizations that have withstood this are the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which have embraced harm reduction as a part of the promotion of human dignity, ... and the second is the WHO [World Health Organization], which came out with a very strong endorsement in saying the WHO is a professional technical organization, and we are not going to back away from the science, and if the science says that harm reduction, needle and syringe exchange and methadone maintenance are effective tools for HIV prevention, we're not changing. ... It's absolutely great that WHO has stood up as a scientific and technical organization and it's not going to back away from the evidence, not going to back away from harm reduction. But they are not the implementers of the Global Fund [To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria], and that's where the U.N. dollars really aren't flowing. So they actually have less programmatic impact, unfortunately. [read on...]

AIDS Lessons: Kenya Girl Guide Association

Mariella Furrer for The New York Times
Rangers of the Kenya Girl Guide Association at St. George's School in Nairobi. Rangers take a pledge of abstinence.

via NYTimes:
AFRICA: Letter from Kenya
Where AIDS Galloped, Lessons in Applying the Reins
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: May 18, 2006

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya is a rarity in Africa, a nation where experts say the AIDS epidemic shows signs of easing. So this land of safaris has become a hunting ground of a different sort, attracting policy makers and researchers looking for keys to slowing the relentless spread of AIDS elsewhere on the continent.

The trends are heartening. Medical experts here estimate that the number of new H.I.V. infections has plummeted over the last decade from a peak of more than 200,000 a year to fewer than 90,000.

And changes in sexual habits seem to be contributing to the decline. Men say they are having sex with fewer partners, and women report losing their virginity later. Many teenagers, once sexually active, say they are abstaining entirely.

Such shifts, documented in large-scale surveys, suggest that abstinence programs championed by Congressional Republicans in Washington have some chance of success. Critics of the Republican approach say it has overemphasized abstinence at the expense of condoms and other prevention strategies. Kenyan health officials frankly acknowledge that evidence is lacking on the effectiveness of programs that promote condoms or abstinence.

According to the United Nations AIDS agency, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe are the sub-Saharan countries with documented declines in H.I.V. prevalence. Researchers agree that the fall is partly because AIDS deaths have reduced the population of H.I.V.-positive people. But they also say it is likely that behavior change has helped. In Uganda, increased use of condoms has been important.

Health officials here say the spread of knowledge about how to prevent infection and a rising tide of death have been catalytic. Three out of four Kenyans now know someone who has become sick or died from AIDS, up from 40 percent a decade ago. "That is a shock treatment," said Godfrey M. Baltazar, an epidemiologist who oversees monitoring of the Kenyan government's AIDS programs.

As donors have ratcheted up financing of anti-AIDS programs, the landscape for prevention has changed. Since President Bush's global AIDS plan was enacted in 2003, the United States has become the dominant donor in Kenya, spending $208 million this year to combat AIDS — more than all other donors combined.

More than half that money is financing the feverish drive for diagnosis of AIDS and treatment of infected people here. The number tested in Kenya, with a population of 32 million, has more than tripled since 2003, to 1.5 million last year. The number of AIDS patients receiving drug treatment has rocketed to 70,000 from fewer than 10,000 in 2003.

Paradoxically, the explosive growth in testing and treatment may be Washington's most important contribution to preventing the spread of the disease. Once people know that AIDS is not a death sentence, they are more willing to be tested, and once they know their H.I.V. status they can protect themselves and their sexual partners.

This knowledge is critical in light of the experts' judgment that more than half the new infections in Kenya are with couples in which one partner is H.I.V.-positive.

The United States is also paying for programs aimed at changing behavior. This year, it will spend $15.7 million on programs that promote abstinence and faithfulness, and $7.8 million to prevent sexual transmission of H.I.V., including distribution of condoms to high-risk groups.

Seen from Kenya, the debate that rages in Washington over AIDS and sex sometimes seems more a reflection of American culture wars than African realities.

Conservative Republican leaders in the House of Representatives successfully included a provision in the 2003 law requiring that a third of AIDS-prevention money go to programs that promote abstinence.

Under the guidelines, United States funds can be used in schools to educate children 14 and younger about abstinence and faithfulness, with condom education added for those 15 and older. The rules permit teachers and volunteers to answer children's questions about condoms, though not to introduce the topic.

With United States financing, Population Services International, a nonprofit group, is organizing abstinence clubs for 10- to 15-year-olds here. P.S.I. does not teach the children about condoms, but answers their questions.
[read on...]

AIDS - What AIDS?

 
via Sivacracy: "Time to Cancel that Subscription to Harper's Magazine":
The Columbia Journalism Review's CRJDAILY:
Mar. 08, 2006 - 11:13 AM
AIDS - What AIDS?
Harper’s Races Right Over the Edge of a Cliff
Gal Beckerman

The essay on AIDS in this month's Harper's magazine by Celia Farber starts off like a scientific whodunit -- as Farber herself puts it, the tale she tells sounds eerily like the "Constant Gardener," the recent movie based on a John Le Carre novel about evil pharmaceutical companies engaged in unethical human testing.

In the first half of her article titled, "Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science," Farber describes what led to the death of a pregnant HIV-positive woman who was taking an experimental drug, Nevirapine, to avoid transmitting the virus to her unborn child. The drug's toxicity, which had never been properly tested, killed the woman, and Farber traces the negligence back to tests in Uganda that were improperly conducted on human subjects. She also tells the story of a whistleblower at the NIH who was attacked for exposing the faulty trials.

It's an engaging piece of investigative journalism that exposes deep problems with the standards of medical research when it comes to AIDS. As she writes, "the emergence of the syndrome in the 1980s sparked a medical state of emergency in which scientific controls, the rules that are supposed to bracket the emotions and desires of individual researchers, were frequently compromised or removed entirely."

Her argument is that AIDS has become an industry and a certain kind of sloppiness has entered the search for new anti-retroviral drugs. So far, so good, and if this were the only story Farber hoped to tell, we might well be tipping our hat to her.

But she goes on to use the Nevirapine trial as a launching pad for what she really wants to say -- that big pharmaceutical companies have basically invented the concept of AIDS in order to sell their product, which, being extremely toxic, is what is actually killing people who are diagnosed HIV-positive.

She doesn't take responsibility herself for this startling -- some might say preposterous -- thesis, but rather approvingly points to UC Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, who has taken much heat for questioning the causality between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg has gained a name as a "denialist" for asserting that AIDS is actually a "chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use," or that "75 percent of AIDS cases in the West can be attributed to drug toxicity. If toxic AIDS therapies were discontinued ... thousands of lives could be saved virtually overnight." And, most bizarre to our ears: "AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that currently do not command high rates of international aid. The money spent on anti-retroviral drugs would be better spent on sanitation and improving access to safe drinking water."

Farber takes up that banner and complains that AIDS researchers "have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or co-factors." Which, again, would be a legitimate complaint to make -- were it not for the implication that HIV as the cause of AIDS has been invented for the sake of keeping certain scientists and pharmaceutical companies in business.

The article has inspired great anger among "so-called AIDS activists," as Farber dismissively refers to them, who are seething at Harper's decision to give Farber such a prominent soapbox. One example is a letter from Gregg Gonsalves, director of Gay Men's Health Crisis: "Farber is a well-known AIDS denialist and publishing her work is akin to giving the folks at the Discovery Institute a place to expound upon the 'science' of intelligent design, Charles Davenport a venue to educate us about the racial inferiority of the Negro or Lyndon LaRouche a platform to warn us about aliens, bio-duplication, and nudity."

The debate between the public health community and the "denialists" is an old one. What's most interesting in this latest dustup is that the Nation has decided to join the incensed scientists in shaming Harper's for running the Farber piece.

On the magazine's blog, The Notion, Richard Kim claims that Farber does not do justice to the varying approaches taken by those researching AIDS, writing that "conspiracy theories like Duesberg's warp and exploit some of the best political interventions made by AIDS activists: that patients should be engaged with their medical diagnosis and treatment, that clinical drug trials should be grounded in sound ethical practices, that the emphasis on virology has circumvented immunological approaches to AIDS and that attention to the effects of poverty, malnutrition and other diseases is vital to preventing and treating AIDS."

Kim also writes that "it's a shame that a magazine as well respected as Harper's has shirked its duty to report on these issues and instead published Farber's article."

We have to agree. The if-it's-conventional-wisdom-it-must-be-wrong ethos that Harper's has come to embrace in the last days of the counterintuitive Lewis Lapham as editor has served the magazine poorly here, giving space to an idea that, as Kim points out, has been widely refuted for years -- and one that, frankly, has been consigned to the dustbin of crackpot theories.

In short: when the Nation, of all places, is criticizing you for your knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism, it's a pretty good bet that you have probably wandered off the deep end.

Next time, Harper's should be more careful about giving so much legitimacy -- 15 pages of it -- to such an illegitimate and discredited idea.

The essay on AIDS in this month's Harper's magazine by Celia Farber starts off like a scientific whodunit -- as Farber herself puts it, the tale she tells sounds eerily like the "Constant Gardener," the recent movie based on a John Le Carre novel about evil pharmaceutical companies engaged in unethical human testing.

In the first half of her article titled, "Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science," Farber describes what led to the death of a pregnant HIV-positive woman who was taking an experimental drug, Nevirapine, to avoid transmitting the virus to her unborn child. The drug's toxicity, which had never been properly tested, killed the woman, and Farber traces the negligence back to tests in Uganda that were improperly conducted on human subjects. She also tells the story of a whistleblower at the NIH who was attacked for exposing the faulty trials.

It's an engaging piece of investigative journalism that exposes deep problems with the standards of medical research when it comes to AIDS. As she writes, "the emergence of the syndrome in the 1980s sparked a medical state of emergency in which scientific controls, the rules that are supposed to bracket the emotions and desires of individual researchers, were frequently compromised or removed entirely."

Her argument is that AIDS has become an industry and a certain kind of sloppiness has entered the search for new anti-retroviral drugs. So far, so good, and if this were the only story Farber hoped to tell, we might well be tipping our hat to her.

But she goes on to use the Nevirapine trial as a launching pad for what she really wants to say -- that big pharmaceutical companies have basically invented the concept of AIDS in order to sell their product, which, being extremely toxic, is what is actually killing people who are diagnosed HIV-positive.

She doesn't take responsibility herself for this startling -- some might say preposterous -- thesis, but rather approvingly points to UC Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, who has taken much heat for questioning the causality between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg has gained a name as a "denialist" for asserting that AIDS is actually a "chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use," or that "75 percent of AIDS cases in the West can be attributed to drug toxicity. If toxic AIDS therapies were discontinued ... thousands of lives could be saved virtually overnight." And, most bizarre to our ears: "AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that currently do not command high rates of international aid. The money spent on anti-retroviral drugs would be better spent on sanitation and improving access to safe drinking water."

Farber takes up that banner and complains that AIDS researchers "have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or co-factors." Which, again, would be a legitimate complaint to make -- were it not for the implication that HIV as the cause of AIDS has been invented for the sake of keeping certain scientists and pharmaceutical companies in business.

The article has inspired great anger among "so-called AIDS activists," as Farber dismissively refers to them, who are seething at Harper's decision to give Farber such a prominent soapbox. One example is a letter from Gregg Gonsalves, director of Gay Men's Health Crisis: "Farber is a well-known AIDS denialist and publishing her work is akin to giving the folks at the Discovery Institute a place to expound upon the 'science' of intelligent design, Charles Davenport a venue to educate us about the racial inferiority of the Negro or Lyndon LaRouche a platform to warn us about aliens, bio-duplication, and nudity."

The debate between the public health community and the "denialists" is an old one. What's most interesting in this latest dustup is that the Nation has decided to join the incensed scientists in shaming Harper's for running the Farber piece.

On the magazine's blog, The Notion, Richard Kim claims that Farber does not do justice to the varying approaches taken by those researching AIDS, writing that "conspiracy theories like Duesberg's warp and exploit some of the best political interventions made by AIDS activists: that patients should be engaged with their medical diagnosis and treatment, that clinical drug trials should be grounded in sound ethical practices, that the emphasis on virology has circumvented immunological approaches to AIDS and that attention to the effects of poverty, malnutrition and other diseases is vital to preventing and treating AIDS."

Kim also writes that "it's a shame that a magazine as well respected as Harper's has shirked its duty to report on these issues and instead published Farber's article."

We have to agree. The if-it's-conventional-wisdom-it-must-be-wrong ethos that Harper's has come to embrace in the last days of the counterintuitive Lewis Lapham as editor has served the magazine poorly here, giving space to an idea that, as Kim points out, has been widely refuted for years -- and one that, frankly, has been consigned to the dustbin of crackpot theories.

In short: when the Nation, of all places, is criticizing you for your knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism, it's a pretty good bet that you have probably wandered off the deep end.

Next time, Harper's should be more careful about giving so much legitimacy -- 15 pages of it -- to such an illegitimate and discredited idea.

The Body at Risk @ ICP

Image courtesy NetworkPhotographers.com

via NYTimes:
Photography Review | 'The Body at Risk'
Picturing Some Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To [excerpts]
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: December 26, 2005

With war photographs confronting us daily, do we need an exhibition to remind us of the body's vulnerability? But the havoc caused by war is only one aspect of it. There is disease, domestic violence, environmental pollution, the enfeeblement of old age, starvation, drug addiction and more - much more. It's a gloomy picture and "The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness and Healing" at the International Center of Photography is not for the squeamish. But the show is not all downbeat.

"The Body at Risk" is a collaboration between the photography center and the Milbank Memorial Fund, a New York-based foundation that since 1905 has sought to improve public health through research and advocacy. The show was assembled by Carol Squiers, a curator at the center, from the work of 16 documentary photographers, among them Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Donna Ferrato, Sebastião Salgado and Marion Post Wolcott. Ms. Squiers has also written a substantial catalog.

The show takes in a lot of pictorial territory, from the now-familiar shots of maltreated child laborers by Hine, the early 20th-century reformer, to victims of the AIDS rampage in Africa by the South African photographer Gideon Mendel. A section on the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal health initiative from the mid-1930's to the early 1940's, details the plight of tenant farmers and migrant laborers during the Depression, and some of the federal programs assisting them. Environmental pollution is addressed by David Hanson, whose photographs of affected sites, and their monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency, come with maps and written descriptions.

One of the sections that is most painful in its immediacy - and the only one in color - presents images from Lori Grinker's long-running project about war veterans. Addressing the lasting effects of war on the surviving wounded, it doesn't stint in its depiction of maimed bodies. A 2003 photograph of a 28-year-old Marine, Sgt. Jose Torres, who was wounded in Iraq by both enemy and friendly fire, shows him aboard a hospital ship, being prepped for his ninth operation. [...]

"The Body at Risk" is a show where straightforward, documentary photography serves its subjects best. But art sometimes creeps into journalism (and vice versa). Among the examples are Smith's shots of Maude Callen when he used his favorite device of making dark, shadowy pictures subtly illuminated by light. In another key are Eugene Richards' raw, chilling emergency room scenes, which include a devastating view of a woman's body abandoned on a table after surgeons failed to revive her bullet-riddled heart.

The show's most poignant shot was made in 2000 by Mr. Mendel. It shows a Tanzanian mother, Dorika Gabriel, as she lovingly carries the skeletal body of her 30-year-old son, Joseph, dying of AIDS, to a spot outside their hovel where he can sit in the shade.

"The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness and Healing" is on view at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, through Feb. 26.

On Healing and Memory, Rescheduled

For all of us still in the city (and not going to the Miami Basel Art Fair):

CONVERSATION
On Healing and Memory
AA Bronson in conversation with Gregg Bordowitz and Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Rescheduled for
Saturday, December 3, 2005, 4 - 5:30PM, followed by a reception

The New School, Wollman Hall
66 West 12th Street, 4th floor
New York City

Admission: $8, free for students with valid ID (see ticket info below)

"My practice starts with my hands. When I put my hands on your body, I get information. That's where I begin, with my hands on your body on my massage table. We talk. I get an idea of you and your energy and your particular needs; a sort of psychic reading." (AA Bronson)

A unique opportunity to hear one of the great figures of American conceptual art, and to have his practice illuminated by one of the key critics of the genre, Gregg Bordowitz. Eminent anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli will offer a reprise of their conversation that will touch on death, memory and healing. [more info]

AIDS + Katrina

image source

via Breitbart:
Katrina Displaces Thousands With HIV
Sep 12 3:49 PM US/Eastern
By MARTHA MENDOZA
AP National Writer

About 8,000 people with HIV and AIDS who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina now face the massive challenge of trying to manage their disease without their doctors, their clinics and their support systems.
[...]
Many advocates said this week that with an impending public health disaster looming in the Gulf region, they feared that people living with HIV and AIDS might slip through the cracks.

"There are many immediate, midterm and long-term issues that will literally be life and death for people living with HIV/AIDS," said Terje Anderson, executive director of the National Association of People with AIDS in an urgent letter seeking help from Health Secretary Michael Leavitt.

more info:
http://www.hrsa.gov/katrina/
http://wbhm.org/News/2005/AIDS_Evacuees.html
http://www.noaidstaskforce.com/
http://www.aidsmeds.com/Fusetalk/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=23185

Katrina AIDS Care Group:
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