AIDS Talkfest on the Road

The International AIDS Conference is again on the road, this time in Mexico City (watch carefully whether the surplus sero-conversions that go with that event match those resulting from the last AIDS conference, or whether they're higher or lower - funny counting game). Anyway, more seriously, there are some interesting issues the talk fest crowd is going on about.

For starters, 150+ HIV vaccine trials crashed not exactly without a trace, rather in quite a few of them those participants randomized into the active arm were becoming more (instead of less) susceptible to picking up HIV. So, both HIV vaccine and HIV microbicide trials have hit a wall of sorts.

Interestingly, however, there's possibly some light at the end of the tunnel. A few months back a team of HIV specialists in Switzerland announced that in their opinion people on antiretrovirals are no more likely to transmit HIV than are people who use condoms. The reason for this is that the medicines reduce an infected person's viral load to such low levels that it's next to impossible to pass the bug on to sexual partners. There's all sorts of caveats, but this matters in the face of rising STI rates among people in high HIV prevalence groups in a whole bunch of countries, including Germany, the USA and many others.

Well, fascinating ethical questions abound: Should one tell people on HIV medicines that their risk is that low or would that mean that they would take unreasonable risks - eg by having more unsafe sex with more people than they would otherwise have? Should we put people very early on in their infection on HIV medicines, for public health reasons as opposed to reasons to do with their medical care? What should we do if there ever arose a conflict between public health interests and patient care? Considering that a substantial number of people on medicines are not as compliant in terms of how they should be taking them, and considering that this leads to more drug resistant mutations of the virus, at what point in time would the early introduction of drugs be outweighed by these undesirable consequences? What are the implications for the criminalization of HIV transmission? If someone duly takes her anti HIV drugs and her partner - not knowing about her infection -picks up the bug anyway, would it be acceptable to punish her?

Difficult new questions to ponder.

L'Oreal - the ugly face of the French beauty conglomerate

The French beauty product company L'Oreal was fined a day or two ago in a French court for racist hiring practices at one of its subsidiaries (Garnier France). The background is that the company, when hiring faces for an advertising campaign targetting the French market, made clear to their head hunting outfit that it expected no less than only white faces to represent 'beauty' in its campaign. The court issued a fine of between 30,000 and 300,000 Euros (my sources couldn't find as consensus on the last digit), and, more significantly perhaps, a 3 months suspended jail sentence for a staff member of the head hunting agency.

It goes without saying that L'Oreal categorically reject the racism charge. It rejected it so much so that it has reportedly (in a different development) decided to continue selling skin bleaching agents to dark(er) skinned Philippina and Philippino. The company promises that its product 'White Perfect' will produce a 'glow within'. I can imagine that people reading this will glow with anger about such health hazards (and so add a slightly reddish blemish to their skin colour variations).

QED, L'Oreal definitely is not a racist organisation. Quite to the contrary, by aiming to make us all look pink with its 'White Perfect' product it shows that really it is a great equalising force. I am just being sarcastic, of course.

There is something terribly sad about Indian and Mexican soap operas' lead characters being usually white or nearly white, while the roles of cleamers, criminals and so on and so forth remain reserved for the darker actors. The same is true of 'White Perfect'.

I guess the only sensible answer to such an issue is to outlaw the sale of 'White Perfect' and similar products and to prescribe ethnicity specific representativeness in things like soap operas. End of story. We have been waiting for voluntarily sensible behaviours, and they just didn't happen. The French court was right to punish those involved. The country must have learned something from the race riots it recently endured.

Wonna know how it feels to be an illegal immigrant?

Really interesting story on the BBC News website. Someone clever has set up a fairly realistic theme park in Mexico, of all places, aiming to give tourists a feel for what it is like to be an illegal Mexican immigrant into the US of A (land of the free etc etc). Fascinating stuff. Read the first person account of the corporation's Mexican correspondent about being an 'iilegal immigrant' at Eco Alberto Park in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo. The park itself is owned and operated by a local indigenous community, the Hnahnu. It is suggested that part of the rationale for setting it up was to generate empathy for 'illegals'.