I know that I haven't blogged in forever, but I couldn't resist a response to this article as I perused the web this morning.

A little background before I comment. If you followed this blog over the past two years or so, you will remember that last August I attended the International Aids Conference in Toronto and came away amazed at what I listened to. In a nutshell, I found the presenters and attenders radically petitioning for two things: more money (from government and big business) to go to prevention techniques (such as microbicides, as mentioned in the article) and to distribute clean needles and condoms around the world, particularly in Russia and China, where this disease is going to spread.

Having said that, if you skim the article you can see the irony in it and my cynicism as the time with these policies. A few comments:

1) This fall, pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. halted study of one of the most promising possibilities, a genetically engineered vaccine being tested on four continents, because it simply did not work. Can you believe they allowed this to be published? I'd love to see the response from the International AIDS Society (I wish I had time to look at their site for any response or to see how they could spin this).

2) The news has been nearly as bad for other technological solutions, including vaginal microbicides, one-a-day prevention pills and diaphragms. You could not even imagine the radical rhetoric that permeated the conference, I actually left at one point, I couldn't take it any more. The theme seemed to be, "We are going to continue with the behaviors that led to us getting this disease (drug injections and unsafe sexual practices), so you find a prevention measure (drug) or a cure, and then distribute it to use for free with taxpayer dollars." Makes sense to me.

3) Who would have thought those crazy Christians may actually have been right in the first place? They favor devoting more of the world's $10 billion annual AIDS spending to proven, lower-tech strategies against HIV, such as circumcising men, promoting sexual monogamy and making birth control more easily available to infected women.

4) I like and agree with the final quote: "If we're defeated in one area, we pull our troops back and attack somewhere else. That's what we're failing to do," he said. "We need a military response, and we have a bureaucratic response."

It's a good article, take a look and let me know what you think.