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Researchers Warned About AIDS Grants
winksmith writes "The NYTimes (free registration, etc.) is
reporting
that scientists researching STD's (including AIDS) must be careful in the wording of reports and particularly of grant requests. many have been verbally warned that phrases like: "sex workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," may cause the government to withhold grant money."
Actually, no. HIV has precisely ONE disease vector: blood-to-blood transfer. And it requires a HUGE viral load to sustain an infection-- on the order of hundreds of thousands of particles.
It's actually very difficult to get HIV.
My wife is a surgeon, and HIV transmission used to be a HUGE concern in the operating room. You're in a tight space with lots of sharp objects; sticks happen all the time. Now we know more about how HIV works, and it's just not a big worry. A concern, sure, but it's a hell of a lot easier to contract Hep C through a needle stick than HIV.
Another excellent example of this is good old polymerase chain reaction (PCR, natch.). The old enzyme that made it sooo much easier to do (insert DNA manipulation of choice here) came out, according to the dimbulbs who give out Golden Fleece awards, "a $1 million study on algae [sic] in warm water." A second example near and dear to my heart is green fluorescent protein (GFP). This tool vital to modern molecular biology eventually fell out of a study on why jellyfish glow when you poke them.