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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."
This is entirely appropriate.
Look, there are lots of diseases that affect human beings. Everything from the common cold to ebola. Some of them are very rare, some widespread. Some are deadly, some place a heavy burden on our health care system, and some are mere nuisances.
Medical science is a zero-sum game. Every dollar or minute spent trying to find a cure for disease X cannot be spent on disease Y. There's only so much money and effort to go around.
Diabetes, stroke, cancer, heart disease, and trauma all kill more people every year worldwide than HIV. Not a few more, either; we're talking about millions of people every year.
Now, every educated person knows that HIV is not limited to gay people, or to drug users, or to people who have anal sex. HIV is out there, and everybody is at risk of contracting it, though for the vast majority of people that risk is statistically insignificant.
But the notion, correct or incorrect, that HIV is confined to a particular group or that it's only transmitted by a particular illegal or socially unacceptable activity gives one pause. Is it really right to spend $X on AIDS research when one hundred times more people die of cancer or heart disease or stroke every year?
If you want funding for your AIDS research, you're going to have to convince the organization offering you the money that your research is more important than research that will help tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people over the long term.
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.
Instead they were requested to use phrases like "hookers", "faggots", "buttfucking" and "junkies".
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Qualification: I'm a teenager infected with HIV.
Your logic is flawed. People don't make these decisions "to put themselves at risk" in a vaccum. As a sophemore in high school my biology teacher (the most respected teacher in the school) took it upon himself to convince us that condoms didn't work and that abstinance was the only choice. He used pseudo-scienctific terms and charts and graphics to convince us that condoms were incappable of blocking the virus. This was only a few years ago.
When I started becoming sexually active (and kids do, there's no denying it), I was completely under the impression that the use of a condom was futile unless attempting to prevent pregnancy.
Social research is imporantant in preventing this sort of FUD from being spread around.