co.design, 10.10.17 Cold metal. Eerie clicking sound. Torturous duck-billed shape. Yes, I’m talking about the speculum, the anxiety-inducing device that doctors use to check vaginal health. Despite its status as an instrument of discomfort and its dark history–involving a doctor who experimented on slave women – the speculum remains to this day one of the centerpieces of the often dreaded annual...
Medical News Today, Thursday 8 December 2016 Cities with substantial uncircumcised populations in 1950 tended to have higher HIV-2 prevalence from 1985. In West African cities, male circumcision rates in 1950 were negatively correlated with HIV-2 prevalence from 1985, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by João Sousa from the University of Leuven, Belgium, and...
SBS, Oct 17th, 2016 For decades, gay bashers operated with impunity. Sometimes, they killed their victims. The police often didn’t care. Sometimes, they were said to be doing the bashing. A culture of indifference meant the bodies piled up as the world looked the other way. But little is known about gay hate crimes outside those now widely documented in NSW. This SBS...
Guardian, 27 Oct 2017 Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west. Using sophisticated genetic techniques, an international team of researchers have revealed that the virus emerged from a pre-existing epidemic in the Caribbean, arrived in New York by the early 1970s and then...
Radio Adelaide, April 2016 In this oral history documentary, produced by Judith Peppard, South Australian sex workers and their advocates describe how they organised politically to work for law reform and put in place measures to keep workers safe during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Sex workers talk about how living in a criminalised environment affects their work and lives. The Threat is...
The Guardian, 13 April 2016
Based on insights from computer models, scientists argue that the shift away from polygynous societies – where men had many long-term partners, but women had only one – could be down to the impact of sexually transmitted infections on large communities that arose with the dawn of the agricultural age.
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