on second thought

so you know how i wrote about how Pisani pissed me off a bit? well, her high school flippancy still bothers the serious nerd in me, but in acknowledgement of my own penchant for sarcasm, I gave her a break and read her book. In summary, these are her scarlett letters against the AIDS industry:

“the Community” is bullshit. Infected housewives have nothing to do with prostitutes, in fact they hate the prostitutes (who their husbands visited, causing their infections). Don’t put any old infected person in the same support group.

Peer education is bullshit. Prostitutes can’t teach each other supportively how to prevent HIV because they don’t trust each other because they compete for clients.

AIDs is not a job qualification; having AIDS does not make you a good counselor, researcher, or policymaker. “Participation” by infected but otherwise untrained people in these activities can and does screw them up.

Bush gave $15 billion to AIDS in the developing world to divert attention from his racist, illegal war in Iraq.

The unfortunate result of lots of money for ever-cheaper antiretroviral meds is that more people live with HIV chronically; the longer you live with it, the longer you have to infect other people with it.

NGOs serve a few people well. It’s like World vision foster children: sure, one child goes to school, but what about the starved economy of the entire nation?

Government can effectively do prevention, and get at way more people than grassroots groups.

Sub-Saharan Africa has more sex, more promiscuity, more men having sex with young women, more dry, damaging sex- and as a result is the ONLY place in the world where non-sex-worker heterosexuals are contracting HIV like wildfire. EVERYWHERE else, the problem is largely the domain of drug injectors, sex workers and the people purchasing sex from them, and gay men.

Wet, monogamous (even if serially), enjoyable heterosexual sex has a hard time spreading HIV. If infected people didn’t have sex with younger generations HIV would die out almost entirely because of effective prevention of mother-infant transmission.

African leaders and Islamic and Christian leaders have spread lies about HIV and are responsible for seas of infections.

Not supporting safe-injection sites like Vancouver’s Insite is INSANE.

Having lots of sex partners at one time spreads HIV more effectively than having lots of sex partners one after another after another.

You are most infectious in the 6 months after contracting HIV; which is also when you are least likely to be aware of your infection.

Prevention has lost ground to treatment in terms of financial investment. Big surprise there.

Generous confidentiality about HIV testing might have been a mistake in terms of protecting the infected: if it’s so unworthy of discrimination, why so much pressure to hide my HIV status?

….

I hand it to Pisani, although some are quite obvious, and all took way too long to communicate, these are great points.