VisualAIDS

Full Scholarships for HIV Advocates

An HIV research forum held April 20 through 23 in Baltimore is offering 150 full scholarships to advocates working in HIV/AIDS or related fields. The event is titled The HIV Research Catalyst Forum: Treatment, Prevention, Advocacy. The deadline for submissions is February 19, 2010.

Details on http://www.hivresearchcatalystforum.org/scholarship

A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body

 

Book Review:

A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body

By Ed Cohen

Biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years "immunity," a legal concept invented in ancient Rome, serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends. "Self defense" also originates in a juridico-political context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first "natural right." In the 1880s and 1890s, biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one, creating a new vital function, "immunity-as-defense." In A Body Worth Defending, Ed Cohen reveals unacknowledged political, economic, and philosophical assumptions about the human body that biomedicine incorporates when it recruits immunity to safeguard the vulnerable living organism.

Inspired by Michel Foucault's writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces immunity's migration from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies which percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. In so doing, he shows that by the late nineteenth century, "the body" literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.

More info here.

Cover image: Robert Flack, Anatomical Garden, 1990

A World First: Vaccine Helps Prevent HIV Infection

From the New York Times

BANGKOK (AP) -- For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible.

The World Health Organization and the U.N. agency UNAIDS said the results ''instilled new hope'' in the field of HIV vaccine research.

The vaccine -- a combination of two previously unsuccessful vaccines -- cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world's largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok.

Even though the benefit is modest, ''it's the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine,'' Col. Jerome Kim told The Associated Press. He helped lead the study for the U.S. Army, which sponsored it with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The institute's director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned that this is ''not the end of the road,'' but said he was surprised and very pleased by the outcome.

''It gives me cautious optimism about the possibility of improving this result'' and developing a more effective AIDS vaccine, Fauci said. ''This is something that we can do.'' (read more here)

From The Guardian.co.uk

The world's deadliest viruses and bacteria – from HIV to swine flu have been reconfigured as delicate glass sculptures by Bristol artist, Luke Jerram. With the help of virologists and glassblowers, Jerram has created a series of works designed to challenge the way viruses – which are naturally transparent – are presented in the media in bold colour for dramatic effect. An exhibition of the glass renderings opens at the Smithfield gallery, London, on 22 September until 3 October.

Image: Luke Jerram, HIV virus, glass

Artists and Critics, Scientists and Activists To Discuss Impact of AIDS on Arts, Science

Artists and Critics, Scientists and Activists
To Discuss Impact of AIDS on Arts, Science

Panels Commemorate World AIDS Day on 25th Anniversary of the Epidemic

Friday, December 1, 2006

panels begin respectively at 6pm & 8pm [Link]

The New School's Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor.

(New York, NY, Nov. 20, 2006)  --  In commemoration of World AIDS Day and the 25th anniversary of the advent of the epidemic, The New School's Wolfson Center for National Affairs will host two panels on Dec. 1 that will examine the impact of AIDS on the arts and on science.

1) "AIDS and the Politics of Science"

6 p.m.

The first panel, "AIDS and the Politics of Science," will explore the way AIDS has brought politics and science into conflict and collaboration.  In the early days of the epidemic, the political drive to address AIDS and HIV came from the street.  Today it comes from foundations, governments, and business. Activists, clinicians, and scientists will discuss what the intersection of science and politics has wrought and where politics is taking science today.

Panelists include:

Dr. Chris Beyrer, director of the Johns Hopkins Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program and of the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health & Human Rights, and author of "War in the Blood: Sex, Politics, and AIDS in Southeast Asia";

Dr. Jonathan Jacobs, professor of clinical medicine at Cornell's Weill Medical College and director of the Center for Special Studies (HIV/AIDS);

Christopher Murray, LMSW, a counselor at New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center and a therapist in private practice who is on the board of directors of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America;

 Borris Powell, an AIDS activist who is program director, Gay Men of African Descent;

Dr. Kent A Sepkowitz, MD, senior medical advisor to New York City's Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control;

Liza Solomon, former executive director of the Maryland AIDS Administration and a founder and chairman of Maryland's AIDS Legislative Committee, a statewide non-profit advocacy and lobbying organization.

2) "Beyond Lament: AIDS and the Arts"

8 p.m

The second panel, "Beyond Lament: AIDS and the Arts," will look at how the artistic response to AIDS has changed our perception of the disease and of life, love, death, and survival. Artists of all kinds were among the first to respond to AIDS, finding myriad meanings in the pandemic. Now, in this panel, artists and cultural critics explore the implications of an epidemic that can still seem unimaginable-even as they ask whether AIDS as a treatable disease has lost its cultural punch.

Participants include:

Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, an author and AIDS and immigration activist who is playwright in residence at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut;

Samuel Delany, professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University and author of numerous works of non-fiction and novels, including The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, the first novel from a major American publisher about AIDS;

Mark Doty, a poet whose many awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award;

Neil Greenberg, a choreographer and founder of Dance By Neil Greenberg, known for his groundbreaking "Not-About-AIDS-Dance";

Sapphire, author of two books of poetry, American Dreams; Black Wings and Blind Angels , and the award winning novel, Push;

Philip Yenawine, an author and educator who is co-founder of Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a non profit educational research organization, and former chairman of Visual AIDS.

The panel will be moderated by Laura Kaminsky, dean of the School of Music and SUNY Purchase and composer of "And Trouble Came:  An African AIDS Diary."

Admission to either or both events is $8 and is free to all students and New School alumni with ID.

In person purchases can be made at The New School box office at 66 West 12th St., main floor, Monday- Friday 1 to 7 p.m. Inquiries can be sent to [email protected] or 212.229.5488.

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.

World AIDS Day: NYTimes Round-up

Dec.1 slide show from the NYTimes.

Headlines, Dec 1, 2005:
Editorial
The State of AIDS

AIDS is outrunning us. The annual report of the United Nations' AIDS agency, released last week to mark World AIDS Day today, informs us that this year there will be 5 million new infections, a record, and more than 3.1 million deaths, another record.

The most troubling aspect of the report by the agency, Unaids, is its grim evidence that many large countries are still closing their eyes to limited AIDS epidemics that will soon explode into the general population. India is providing numbers no one believes. Russia has the world's fastest-growing epidemic, fueled by intravenous drug abuse. Drug abuse also now accounts for half of China's AIDS cases, and it is spreading AIDS infections rapidly in Vietnam, Indonesia and Pakistan.

There is a proven way to halt the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug abusers: provide them with clean needles so they need not share dirty ones. But many governments won't do it because they fear being seen as endorsing drug abuse. The United States prohibits the use of its money for needle exchanges and is actively trying to prevent anyone else from working on the issue. In Russia, whose epidemic is nearly entirely due to drug abuse, it's illegal even to advocate needle exchanges. The price of this shortsightedness will be AIDS epidemics that spread into the general population.
[read on...]

   

Front Row
From Kenneth Cole, a New Solidarity
By ERIC WILSON

KENNETH COLE, who sometimes pushes the boundaries of good taste in his pun-laden, socially conscious advertising, will introduce a public service campaign tied to World AIDS Day today. It is one he anticipates will elicit more attention, and probably controversy, than any of his prior statements.

The message of Mr. Cole's latest campaign, emblazoned on $35 T-shirts, which will benefit AIDS charities and will be carried at Barneys New York, Scoop, Louis Boston and other stores, is "We All Have AIDS." Some of the T-shirts are more provocative, stating bluntly, "I Have AIDS."

Mr. Cole said he hopes people, infected or not, will wear them as a gesture to diminish the stigma associated with the disease by subverting the notion that AIDS affects only those infected with the H.I.V. virus. [read on...]

Thousands Mark World AIDS Day
(AP)
On World AIDS Day, U.N. Calls for 'Exceptional Response'
(Reuters)
Rage, Remorse, but Some Hope in Africa on AIDS Day
(Reuters)
MTV Makes AIDS Film and Offers It for Free
(Reuters)
Aggressive H.I.V. Monitoring Is Urged by City Health Chief
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Bush Pledges to Bolster AIDS Fight
(AP)

AIDS Goal Missed, but Effort by U.N. Branch Is Praised
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Published: November 29, 2005

Silent Spring @ New York Academy of Sciences

image source


via Newsgrist:
Nick Debs, Director Emeritus of Visual AIDS, and founder of Debs & Co., one of the pioneering young galleries of the early Chelsea scene, is stirring up new projects: 

presenting: 

THE OBLIGATION TO ENDURE
Art & Ecology Since 'Silent Spring'
curated by Nick Debs

November 4, 2005  - January 13, 2006
opening reception: Friday, Nov 4, 6-8pm

New York Academy of Sciences
2 East 63rd Street
New York, NY 10021

participating artists:
Joy Episalla - Joy Garnett - Tom Hawkins - Dominic McGill - John McLachlin - Jason Middlebrook - Frank Moore - Catherine Murphy - Bruce Nauman - Gary Ponzo - Amy Jean Porter - Alexis Rockman - David Wojnarowicz - Carrie Yamaoka

from the press release :

If Rachel Carson were alive today, she would probably be pleased about the heightened public awareness of the environment and some of the protective legislation passed since she wrote Silent Spring. She would likely be much less satisfied with the ongoing battle between those who wish to preserve our natural environment and those whose efforts continue to contribute to its deterioration and destruction.

And just as Carson brought an investigative scientific eye to the problems of pesticides that she described in her groundbreaking book, an exhibition opening November 4 at the New York Academy of Sciences likewise casts a probing artistic look at some of the most critical environmental issues facing the world today.  The exhibition, The Obligation to Endure: Art & Ecology Since Silent Spring, reflects one of Carson's favorite maxims by the French biologist Jean Rostand: "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know." [read on]