Category Archives: World watch

World watch

A step back for South Africa

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South African president Thabo Mbeki, famous for questioning the link between HIV and AIDS, has dismissed Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, the health minister who seemed to be making a real difference to the country’s fight against AIDS.

Madlala-Routledge had replaced previous health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang — often called simply “Manto” — who likes to offer beetroot, lemon juice and garlic as remedies for AIDS. After that particular brand of denialism, Madlala-Routledge’s tenure was particularly welcome, as I wrote last November.

After her arrival, South Africa announced a comprehensive prevention program and openly acknowledged the gravity of its epidemic. Only a few days ago, the government announced that for the first time in years, its HIV prevalence had fallen — albeit not by much.

It’s a shame that the president has so quickly undone the small progress the country had made. No more beetroot and garlic, please!

Free at last!

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A lesson for us all: when reason and logic don’t work, try bribery. After eight years in prison, the medics being held in Libya for allegedly infecting more than 400 children with HIV are free.

But their freedom has been bought rather than won, with the US and Europe helping to pay off the affected families and promising Libya millions, if not billions, of dollars in aid and debt forgiveness.

Many expected the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor to be freed five years ago, when expert virologists Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzi submitted a report showing that the children had become infected before the medics ever set foot in Libya, and that the infections were almost certainly the result of poor hospital hygiene rather than sinister acts.

But the court threw out the report and refused to accept further international evidence, relying instead on a flimsy Libyan document that researchers say contained “a shocking lack of evidence” to slap the accused with a death sentence.

Just as children who misbehave shouldn’t be given treats, Libya shouldn’t be rewarded for acting up. With lives hanging in the balance, the international community couldn’t afford the diplomatic version of tough love. But now that the medics are on friendly soil, I think we should stop dangling cupcakes.

Uploaded on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine’s news intern

In China, dinosaurs, dragons — and death

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Why is it that the most bizarre — and disturbing — science stories always come from Asia, usually China or India? (I can say that, I’m from India).

I live about three blocks from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which has some of the most stunning displays anywhere of dinosaur fossils. People come from all over the world to gawk at these wonders.

In China’s Henan province, it seems, I could have bought dinosaur bones for a mere 50 cents per kilogram.

For at least the last 20 years, villagers in China have apparently been grinding up precious dinosaur bones and boiling them in soup to treat dizziness, leg cramps and such or making a paste and applying them to fractures. One local had collected up to 8,000 kilos of bones, according to the BBC.

The villagers did this because they believed that the bones were from dragons that could fly in the sky and had special powers, according to Dong Zhiming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

**

On a far more serious and horrible note, China has executed its former Food and Administration chief, who had been made the scapegoat for all its recent problems with the regulation of food and drugs. The Associated Press led its story on this saying it was “the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis.”

I’m sorry, what??

How is rushing to execute one man, who became a convenient symbol for everything that ails China’s regulatory system, an indication that the country is serious about fixing its problems?

Although many versions of this story included the offensive phrase, (The Guradian, the NYT) some papers at least (The Independent) edited it out. China may blunder in its rush to fix its image, but we should be demanding an actual clean up of the system, not this tyrannical turn of events, as proof of its intentions.

The ABCs of Bush’s agenda

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By now, there’s mountains of depressing evidence that in the Bush administration, ideology always trumps science.

Nowhere does this seem more cruelly short-sighted than in the administration’s approach to AIDS. I’ve written here before about the government’s insistence that any groups that receive federal funds have to formally oppose prostitution.

Here’s one more disheartening report: after a year-long investigation, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit based in Washington DC, has found that PEPFAR, the administration’s $15 billion AIDS initiative, “has not worked out the way it was envisioned.”

One of PEPFAR’s most criticized aspects is the ABC approach for prevention: abstinence, be faithful and condoms. Neither abstinence nor being faithful is much of an option for a married woman whose husband is unfaithful, but let’s not get bogged down by practical details.

The center’s Consortium of Investigative Journalists filed two dozen Freedom of Information Act requests, FOIA lawsuits against the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services. After more than 100 interviews, examination of thousands of pages of documents and reporting on the ground in affected countries, they say that:

In fact, the actual prevention practices stress the “AB” messages — abstinence until marriage and being faithful to one partner. The “C” has moved to a small c, and the use of condoms is lumped into the category of “other preventions” that includes prevention of mother-to-child transmission, blood safety, safe medical injections and control of intravenous drug use.

It’s nice to see that tomorrow, this ambitious project, dubbed “”https://www.publicintegrity.org/aids/“>Divine intervention”, is set to win the first prize in online and trade journals category from the Association of Health Care Journalists.

On another positive note, I mentioned before that Brazil had turned down money from the US rather than meet the ideological demands. Looks like even within this country, there’s some rebellion afoot.

On March 5, Wisconsin turned down about $600,000 in federal “abstinence-only-before-marriage” funds because the money would have prevented programs from teaching kids about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases. California, Maine, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have also turned down the funds and another dozen are set to do the same, according to Madison’s The Capital Times

Denying AIDS

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My New Yorker mag arrived Monday with an article about a topic that’s all too familiar to us, here at Nature Medicine. Science reporter Michael Specter wrote about AIDS denialists — or dissenters as they like to call themselves — who say either that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good, and that most scientists are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. That last bit may be debatable, but to us and to everyone we consider credible, there’s no doubt that HIV causes AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs are safe.

I’m happy the New Yorker gave this urgent and deeply troubling issue some much-needed attention, but I’m a bit disappointed with its tepid tone. If you get through the whole article — and I suppose many of the magazine’s readers do — you come away with the feeling that the denialists are certainly wrong. But the first few pages give so much space to Peter Duesberg, the most famous denialist, and to the potential benefits of South Africa’s traditional medicines that you might almost be tempted to think these people have a fair point. After all, who among us hasn’t thought that scientists can be too harsh on those who don’t agree with the reigning hypothesis or that they don’t pay enough attention to traditional therapies?

But this is not your average scientific disagreement. There is NO question that HIV causes AIDS and to follow the “he said-she said” school of journalism in this case, strikes me as tame and… well, I’ll leave it there. I hope the New Yorker piece goes some way to repairing the damage caused last year by an article in Harper’s by dissenter Celia Farber.

For our part, we’ve covered the resurgence of denialists and the activities, in particular, of one Matthias Rath, who markets multivitamins as a cure for AIDS. Scientists and AIDS activists have sued the South African government and Rath for conducting trials of the so-called vitamin cures.

These denialists like to distort scientists’ own statements to support their theories and have even misappropriated sentences from one of our scientific reports, which we explicitly countered in an editorial last year after the Harper’s piece appeared. And we hope more of the mainstream press steps up to cover this issue.

Update: We have decided not to accept any more comments on this post, as the discussion between the two camps is not productive. We don’t want this blog to perpetuate a discussion that has already received too much attention

Money for a moral stance

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Can the US government compel non-governmental organziations (NGOs) to condemn prostitution?

Yes, if those NGOs want to qualify for government funds. That’s the upshot of a ruling on Tuesday by a federal appeals court.

Since 2003, the US has required that to qualify for funds from the $15 billion PEPFAR program for AIDS, nonprofit groups abroad have to explicitly oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

NGOs say that taking an explicit antiprostitution stance would make it harder for them to work with sex workers, one of the highest risk groups for HIV infection. In 2005, Brazil refused $40 million from the US rather than comply with the requriements.

Even within the US, the law has been controversial and has gone through a long process of rulings and counter-rulings.

In 2005, after the law expanded to include US groups, DKT International, a Washington D.C-based organization, sued the government, arguing that the law violated its free speech rights.

Last year, a lower court agreed and ruled that the law is unconstitutional. But on Tuesday, US Circuit Judge A Raymond Randolph reversed that ruling, saying that the US Congress has authorized the Bush administration to fund these groups “on such terms and conditions as the President may determine.”

What do you think? Are these acceptable strings?

Sorry times for Indian science

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Something strange—and embarassing—has happened in India.

For the past few weeks, Novartis has been fighting a lawsuit in India that could affect the availability of cheap drugs worldwide. The lawsuit challenges India’s decision to interpret WTO rules and only honor patents on drugs that are entirely new, not just derivatives or variations of existing drugs.

This clause allows Indian companies to make cheap copies that they then sell all over the world. The case is still being heard, although high-profile voices, including nonprofit group MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and Henry Waxman, chair of the influential US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have asked Novartis to drop the suit. More than 250,000 people have signed the MSF petition.

In the meantime, the Indian government had asked a high-level committee, including R.A. Mashelkar, who retired last year as Director General of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and is arguably one of the most respected Indian scientists, to look into the patent issue. After nearly two years’ deliberations, the committee produced a report on the law that is favorable to Novartis.

But get this: an Indian newspaper discovered that the crucial bits of the report were plagiarized from a paper published by a think tank in the UK and funded by INTERPAT, an association of pharma companies whose members include Novartis. Mashelkar says he didn’t know about the plagiarism and has withdrawn the report, asking for three months to review it. I buy that he didn’t know about the plagiarism and that it might have crept in when the “draft was being worked on by a sub-group” but the larger issue is the potentially biased source of the original conclusions.

The government hasn’t yet said whether it will accept the revised report, but any way you slice it, this is a deeply embarassing incident for Indian science. Earlier this month, Nature challenged Indian scientists to speak up and help shape policies. This is an inauspicious start indeed.

Stretching science’s implications

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You might have seen the New York Times article yesterday so delightfully called “”https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/science/25sheep.html?em&ex=1169960400&en=83a8a0ffb7f393f8&ei=5087%0A">Of gay sheep, modern science and bad publicity." In case the article has disappeared into the archive by the time you read this, briefly, it was a rather funny cautionary tale about a scientist who set out to study homosexuality in sheep, made one too many comments about the possible implications in people, and ended up getting skewered by the press and the blogosphere, who thought the point of his research was eventually to alter people’s sexuality.

I was particularly struck by a comment that the scientist, Charles Roselli made.

Mentioning human implications, he said, is “in the nature of the way we write our grants” and talk to reporters. Scientists who do basic research find themselves in a bind, he said, adding, “We have been forced to draw connections in a way that we can justify our research.”

As a reporter, I’m guilty of this myself. Drawing human conenctions makes the story more accessible and it’s an easy, if cheap, way of drawing the reader in. Even in my previous life as a scientist, I had an American Heart Association grant although my thesis, on lipid transport, was classic cell biology and had little to do with heart disease. That’s where the money was, and so that’s how we wrote the grant.

But all and said done, it is dishonest, isn’t it? Is Roselli right? Is the system so warped now that we have to lie about human implications to justify working on important, but obscure, questions in science? Have you done it?