Why is Viagra So Popular and Condoms So Controversial?
By Johanna Son
BALI, Aug 15 (TerraViva) – Why is the popular drug Viagra so praised for its virtues and the condom often so villified by conservative religious and other groups the world over, drawing whole churches against its use?
Both are external technological interventions that relate to sexual activity, among the most prominent tools in the area of reproductive health and sexuality. But it is the gender and sexual ideologies behind them — especially when combined with conservative religious forces and aspects of patriarchal culture — that put them on opposite ends of the spectrum of public acceptance.
The result is a paradox that has huge implications for public health concerns, especially in relation to the HIV and AIDS pandemic that is now entering its third decade and affects 33 million people worldwide. Read more…
Social Justice: Prescription for HIV, AIDS Pandemic
Analysis – By Johanna Son
BALI, Aug 13 (TerraViva) – The prescription that thousands of participants effectively issued at a just-ended AIDS conference here Thursday was clear: It’s time for heavy doses of fighting social and structural inequities so that the medical gains in curbing HIV and AIDS can work with maximum efficacy. Read more…
‘Thank God for Condoms!’
By Lynette Lee Corporal
BALI, Aug 13 (TerraViva) – “Thank God for condoms!” Donald Messer of the U.S.-based Centre of Church and Global AIDS declared during one of the many sessions at an AIDS conference for the Asia-Pacific here, which ended Thursday. Read more…
Q&A: ‘We’re Doing Something About the Health System’
Morauta
Papua New Guinea accounts for some 96 percent of all HIV infections in the Pacific, owing to factors ranging from lack of resources to heterosexual modes of transmission and need for more education and prevention. Here, PNG Coordinating Mechanism chair Lady Roslyn Morauta tells TerraViva’s Lynette Lee Corporal about the ills of the health system around HIV and AIDS and how the picture looks ahead. Read more…
Q & A: Self-respect, Self-acceptance are Key for Transgenders
Yuni Shara
Yuni Shara of Yogyakarta, Indonesia has been in transgender advocacy work for 10 years. Before setting up her own NGO with five friends in 2006, she was a volunteer for a transgender community support group under Perkumpulan Keluarga Berencanna Indonesia (Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association). Today, Kebaya works for the welfare of transgenders in that Indonesian city. Shara talks to TerraViva about the challenges she and other transgender face, and her motivation to fight for her rights. Read more…
Dump Intellectual Property Rights on Drugs – Critic
Activists interrupt Wednesday's ICAAP plenary session -- twice. Photo by: J Son
By Johanna Son
BALI, Aug 12 (TerraViva) – Pharmaceutical firms have developed drugs that have lengthened lives and cut death rates from HIV and AIDS, but their financial clout in no way overrides their social responsibility in fighting the pandemic, a key advocate argued Wednesday at an Asian conference on AIDS here. Read more…
Transgenders Assert Identity, Space
By Lynette Lee Corporal
BALI, Aug 12 (TerraViva) — “There has been so much confusion going around transgenders. We are not MSMs (men who have sex with men) and don’t lump us under the transvestite (category either) because we have different needs,” declared Kartini Slemeh at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) here. Read more…
‘Spontaneous’ Protests Wake Audience Up
BALI, Aug 12 (TerraViva) – The lightning protests happened quite quickly — twice – at Wednesday’s plenary session at ICAAP, but the two chairs of the session, Marina Mahathir and UNDP’s Jeff Malley, handled them quite deftly. Read more…
Banging on Policymakers’ Doors
Kumar (left) and Saxena
By Lynette Lee Corporal
BALI, Aug 12 (TerraViva) — ”We’ll bang on the door and force them to open it,” enthused 21-year-old youth leader Ankit Saxena, frustrated by the difficulty of penetrating the world of policymakers to get them to take more action on HIV/AIDS. Read more…
Q & A: ‘It’s Not Difficult to Bring About Social Change’
Gupta
Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the Washington-based International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), explains to TerraViva’s Johanna Son why gender needs to be weaved in more tightly into the response against HIV and AIDS. “The epidemic is just feeding on the fault lines of inequality and discrimination that already existed in our society,” she said. Read more…
