Truly Equal

While president Bush certainly has to deal with a lot of urgent matters (besides his screw-ups I mean), this is something he should not even get close to:

This administration is currently pushing a plan - the Complex 2030 plan - to ramp up activities at nuclear weapons sites around the country.

This is on the heels of North Korea claiming they have a nuclear bomb, and these assholes want to ramp up nuclear weapons? You have got to be kidding me, but that is the Bush administration for ya!

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility:

In the Complex 2030 plan this administration has proposed a new $5 billion facility to build the next generation of nuclear weapons. Some local leaders in your area are already arguing that this new plant will create jobs and spur economic development. But the U.S. can create jobs without building the next generation of nuclear weapons that would escalate the arms race and pose a greater threat to our planet.

Current and retired nuclear workers have suffered from cancers, beryllium disease and many others conditions. We all suffer psychological harm from living in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. If these dangerous weapons were ever used, it would be the ultimate medical catastrophe. The U.S. government has moral and legal obligations to eliminate its nuclear weapons, not build new ones.

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is one kick-ass group, and they won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize just in case you doubt their credentials.

But pray tell, what can one do about the Complex 2030 plan? More from PSR:

The Department of Energy will soon begin preparing an Environmental Impact Statement for its Complex 2030 plan to revitalize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. This is the first step in a process established by the National Environmental Policy Act which requires the government to study the impacts of any new major project. As part of this process, DOE will be accepting public comments on the scope of its research on the impacts of the Complex 2030 plan.

[…]The Energy Department is currently accepting comments on the environmental impacts of its Complex 2030 plan. This gives us an opportunity to let our leaders know that this proposal is a step in the wrong direction. The deadline for public comment on this dangerous plan to revitalize the nuclear weapons complex is January 17th, 2006. Please use PSR’s sample comments to develop your own message to the DOE in the space provided. Tell this administration that we do not need new nuclear weapons!

(all emphasis is mine)

So there you have it - visit the “Stop the Bomblex” website and then take action!

This is from CNN. The conservative wingnuts are going to shit a brick when they read this:

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.

[…]According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

The emphasis is mine. I still know people abstain until they get married, but I’m not naive as to think they are in the minority. In fact, I think I would have had more sexual partners in college if I could go back, but hindsight is a bitch, ain’t it?

Of course, I’m joking (my wife is looking over my elbow…)

Then why all the focus on abstinence-only sex education? Don’t these people get that if you abstain but are uneducated about sex, you are just as likely, maybe even more, to acquire a sexually transmitted disease, or even getting pregnant? You still need to learn about sex, period, and that means TALKING about sex in a sensitive, educated, medically correct, informed-manner, not just pretending people that people don’t have sex. What, they never fell in love while they were younger?

This is not exactly news to anyone who has actually followed the Iraq war, but let me tell you, if the full details of each atrocity were covered by the U.S. media, U.S. support for the war would fall fast.

A piece from Alternet:

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently issued a frightening report documenting the growing practice of public executions of women by Shia Militia. One of the report’s more grisly accounts was a story of a young woman dragged by a wire wound around her neck to a close-by football field and then hung to the goal post. They pierced her body with bullets. Her brother came running trying to defend his sister. He was also shot and killed. Sunni extremists are no better: OWFI members estimate that no less than 30 women are executed monthly for honor related reasons.

I cannot think of one single, fucking reason as to why a woman has to be tortured this way. There is NO reason at all.

I wonder what changed in Iraq - besides the U.S. making a clusterfuck out of that nation I mean. From the same article:

Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women had high levels of education. Their strong and independent women’s movement had successfully forced Saddam’s government to pass the groundbreaking 1959 Family Law Act which ensured equal rights in matters of personal law. Iraqi women could inherit land and property; they had equal rights to divorce and custody of their children; they were protected from domestic violence within the marriage. In other words, they had achieved real gains in the struggle for equality between women and men. Iraqi women, like all Iraqis, certainly suffered from the political repression and lack of freedom, but the secular — albeit brutal — Baathist regime protected women from the religious extremism that denies freedom to a majority of women in the Arab world.

The invasion of Iraq, however, changed the status of Iraqi women for the worse. Iraq’s new colonial power, the United States, elevated a new group of leaders, most of who were allied with ultra conservative Shia clerics. Among the Sunni minority, the quick disappearance of their once dominant political power led to a resurgence of religious identity. Consequently, the Kurds, celebrated for their history of resistance to the Iraqi dictator, were able to reclaim traditions like honor killings, putting thousands of women at risk.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Sadam is sentenced to hang, but there is no reason at all why the existing laws had to be gutted for some other extreme laws. Also, I’m not Iraqi, so I can’t vouch for the laws in question in Iraq, but the author of the article, Kavita N. Ramdas, president of the Global Fund for Women, is a much more knowledgeable about these issues than George W. Bush, or for that matter, the entire Iraq Study Group.

I kid you not:

Hotels throughout the Alps are underbooked; the Italian hoteliers’ association reckons that the lack of snow has so far cost its members £400m this year. World Cup races have already been cancelled or rescheduled in France’s Val d’Isere and Megève and Switzerland’s St Moritz, and one was only able to go ahead in Hochfilzen, in Austria, after local people trucked in 15,000 cubic metres of snow from Grossglockner, the country’s highest peak, to create a thin white run through otherwise green pastures.

Of course that is not the worse of it:

Right across Europe’s highest mountain chain, says the World Meteorological Organisation, only a third as much snow as usual has fallen so far this winter. Temperatures are up to three degrees centigrade higher than normal, and in some resorts the weather is so warm that even artificial snowmaking machines will not work.

[…]A two-year study, which the organisation is due to bring out in February, will conclude that at present 609 of the 666 medium to large Alpine ski resorts have adequate snow cover for at least 100 days a year - but that these could drop to just 200 if temperatures rise by four degrees centigrade. This is something that, according to some experts, could happen by 2050, on the worst-case scenario.

Germany would be the worst affected, with just a one degree rise - which the experts say could happen by 2020 - leading to a 60 per cent drop in resorts with reliable snow. In fact, the Alps abound with signs that climate change is already well under way. In the 15 years running up to the turn of the millennium, they lost nearly a quarter of the area taken up by glaciers. And more than another five per cent melted in the blistering summer of 2003 alone. Average snow levels are half what they were 40 years ago.

Once the rich and pampered find out there is not going to be any snow in their favorite ski resort in Switzerland, they will be global warming’s most ardent activists. Then again, I live near the beach…

From today’s Washington Post:

Last week President Bush hosted a White House summit on malaria. “We know exactly what it takes to treat and prevent the disease,” Mr. Bush said, referring to insecticide-treated bed nets and other simple measures. “The only question is whether we have the will to act.” […]The question is whether health systems in poor countries will be boosted so that circumcision is an option for those who want it.

Action on such issues requires institutions; unfortunately the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is in disarray. The fund provides one-fifth of all donor funding for AIDS, nearly half for TB and two-thirds for malaria; it is central to the battle against all three diseases. But five years after its creation, the fund’s first leader, Richard G.A. Feachem, is stepping down; last month, donors and recipient countries on the organization’s board deadlocked over the choice of a successor.

In other words, say one thing straight to my face, and do another one behind my back. It’s of no use to have these institutions if (1) there’s not firm leadership, and (2) if said fund is being held back by certain donor countries not giving the amount of money they pledged to donate in the first place.

Such is the title of one of today’s New York Times op-ed:

In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers looked at health records from Kisumu, Kenya, a city of 200,000 with high levels of both diseases. They calculated that the interaction of the diseases increased AIDS cases by 8 percent and malaria by 13 percent. Over 25 years, that meant 8,500 additional AIDS cases and almost a million extra cases of malaria. The researchers drew on earlier findings that H.I.V.-positive people who get malaria experience a six- to eight-week spike in the level of the AIDS virus in their blood. During that spike, they are supercontagious, with double the usual chance of infecting a sexual partner. People with H.I.V. have also been proved more likely to catch malaria.

The scientific paper in question is titled, Dual Infection with HIV and Malaria Fuels the Spread of Both Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Laith Abu-Raddad.

From the paper’s abstract:

Mounting evidence has revealed pathological interactions between HIV and malaria in dually infected patients, but the public health implications of the interplay have remained unclear. A transient almost one-log elevation in HIV viral load occurs during febrile malaria episodes; in addition, susceptibility to malaria is enhanced in HIV-infected patients.

Also take a look at this article from Yahoo News.

Of course, the bigger picture here is not just an AIDS-Malaria connection. We know there are other factors involved, such as poverty and the lack of education, both basic education and more direct education regarding hygiene, disease, etc. Also, maternal education here is important, as a mothers’ malaria appears to enhance spread of AIDS virus (from the journal Science also):

For the first time, a study of HIV-infected pregnant women has found that coinfection with malaria significantly increased a mother’s risk of transmitting the AIDS virus to her baby before or during birth.

It’s great that the mainstream media is finally taking a good, hard look (albeit a brief one) at the existing global health problems - all the more reason why we, as future medical professionals and global health advocates, need to push hard and continue lobbying and informing people.

China, this is NOT how you help women. This is straight out of the Middle Ages:

SHANGHAI, Dec. 12 — For people who saw the event on television earlier this month, the scene was like a chilling blast from a past that is 30 years distant: social outcasts and supposed criminals — in this case 100 or so prostitutes and a few pimps — paraded in front of a jeering crowd, their names revealed, and then driven away to jail without trial.

The act of public shaming was intended as the first step in a two-month campaign by the authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen to crack down on prostitution.

This is a picture from the “event”:

Here’s more:

But the event has prompted an angry nationwide backlash, with many people making common cause with the prostitutes over the violation of their human rights and expressing outrage in one online forum after another.

So-called rectification campaigns, or struggle sessions, like these were everyday occurrences during the Cultural Revolution, which officially ended in 1976.

[…]Another asked, “Isn’t this a brutal violation of human rights?” Likening the parading to an act out of the Middle Ages, he added, “Shenzhen’s image has been deeply shamed.”

Well this is certainly good news:

Rates of the most common form of breast cancer dropped a stunning 15 percent from August 2002 to December 2003, researchers reported yesterday.

They proposed a reason for the drop that was just as stunning: It probably occurred, they said, because at that time, millions of women abandoned hormone treatment for the symptoms of menopause after a large national study concluded that the hormones slightly increased breast cancer risk.

The data analysis, led by researchers from MD Anderson Cancer Center and presented at a breast cancer conference in San Antonio, was based on a recent report by the National Cancer Institute on breast cancer incidence.

The title of the post says it all…

It said that gender equality benefited both women and children and was pivotal to the health and development of families, communities and nations. Nasir said the report reflected the feelings of the entire humanity. He called for empowering women, and said that Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had always advocated women’s rights.

The minister called for the elimination of domestic violence, and stressed the need to empower women financially. Shahida Azfar, chief executive of the Family Planning Association of Pakistan, said that the maternal mortality rate was still very high in Pakistan.

Now, if you have access to condoms, I do not suggest you go ahead with a circumcision… all joking aside, this finding - that circumcision significantly reduces men’s chances of acquiring HIV - is remarkably important.

However, it is NOT a substitute for condoms, proper sexual education, and yes, abstinence. I know that everybody wants doctors and scientists to come up with a vaccine, or even better a “wonder drug”, but in most parts of the world, especially in the African continent, a circumcision may be the only chance of maybe escaping, albeit 50% of the time, being infected by HIV.

I am not a fan of circumcision, but if it works… I rather people have access to microbicides instead.