Day: October 16, 2000

This depiction of an MS Word suicide note wizard had me laughing out loud.

While the full impact of the devastating AIDS epidemic in Africa won’t be known for many years, there are already strong suggestions that the continent has a major disaster on its hands.

Although much of the focus is still on future AIDS deaths, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many parts of Africa have already experienced significant loss of life due to AIDS. At the beginning of October, for example, the health ministry in Uganda reported that so far 800,000 of its citizens had died from the disease in the last 17 years (the first case of AIDS being diagnosed in Uganda in the early 1980s). In addition, another 1.5 million Ugandans — more than 7 percent of the current population — are infected with the disease.

There was good news in the Uganda report; the rate of infection has been halved in the last seven years thanks to efforts to talk openly about the disease. That’s little comfort, however, to the millions of people whose lives are likely to be claimed by the disease in Uganda.

Meanwhile in South Africa, where politicians continue to dither about whether or not HIV really caused AIDS, the situation is presently even worse. A South African insurance actuary, Rob Dorrington, recently presented a study that unless there are significant changes in that nation, almost half of all adults could become infected with the disease. According to Dorrington, “South Africa has all the ingredients to make sure the HIV/AIDS epidemic will be the most explosive of any country in the world.”

According to Dorrington, by then end of 2000 about 13 percent of all South Africans would be carrying HIV; so far, Dorrington estimates the disease has killed about 250,000 people. At current rates of infection, however, HIV would infect 45 percent of the adult population by 2010, potentially reducing South Africa’s Life Expectancy rate from the current 63 years to 41 years in a little over a decade.

Although the current South African government deserves a lot of blame for its actions (or lack thereof) on HIV, Dorrington notes that the former apartheid government did the lion’s share of the damage by mismanaging the epidemic while they were in power (condom ads, he notes, weren’t allowed until 1992; a full 10 years after the diagnosis of the first AIDS case in South Africa).

Andre Ferriage, another actuary who presented information about AIDS death summed up the problems facing not only South Africa, but the entire continent. “We are really only at the beginning of the epidemic as far as actual AIDS deaths are concerned,” Ferriage said. “This is a train smash that is going to happen.”

Meanwhile, South Africa’s Medical Research Council announced that after animal tests gave scientists confidence about its safety and efficacy, South Africa will conduct human trials of an AIDS vaccine beginning in February, 20001. The vaccine, Alphavax, targets a strain of the HIV infection that infects about 90% of HIV positive individuals in South Africa.

Initial human tests will be small, focusing on 20 to 50 volunteers initially. Large scale studies featuring control groups would occur sometime by 2005 if the vaccine proves successful. According to the BBC, the vaccine was developed by Robert Johnson at the University of North Carolina and uses an intriguing approach. It incorporates both a hybrid HIV virus as well as Venezuelan equine encephalitis. This strain of encephalitis produces a massive immune response and the hope is that the HIV virus will piggyback on that leading the body to produce an immune response not only to the encephalitis but to the hybrid HIV virus as well.

Time will tell. Even if the disease is successful, however, many more South Africans are going to contract and die from HIV/AIDS in the coming few years — a tragedy of enormous proportions that everyone involved needs to do everything possible to ameliorate.

Sources:

Nearly half of South African adults risk HIV infection in next decade. CNN, October 12, 2000.

Ugandan AIDS deaths top 800,000. The BBC, October 5, 2000.

Aids vaccine trials for South Africa. The BBC, October 5, 2000.

Many wire services and newspapers picked up on a study by researchers at the US National Institute of Child Health and Development that claim men are significantly better at throwing small round objects than women. Here’s the short version: this is one of those studies that is so lacking in any redeeming qualities, that it’s almost certainly an attempt to avoid unemployment by those responsible for it.

First, the researchers tested a grand total of 25 human volunteers and 17 capuchin monkeys. Twenty-five people is simply not enough to establish much of anything meaningful. Sometimes medical researchers have to do very small such studies to make sure a new drug is basically safe before doing real safety and efficacy studies, but there are good ethical and monetary reasons for that. Given the number of women and men who play sports that involve throwing small objects, surely it would have been relatively easy and cheap to do a study on a march larger sample.

Second, the results aren’t all that statistically compelling. The researchers found that throwing balls or stones into a buck at 9 feet and 18 feet away, men were, on average, 32 percent more accurate than women. Given the small size of the sample, that is essentially the same thing as saying there was no difference at all. I don’t want to go into a statistics lesson, but typically to say there were a real effect not only would a larger sample be needed, but the difference in effect should be at least 100 percent or more to avoid the very real possibility that the alleged difference is just a statistical artifact.

The researchers offered two reasons as to why men might throw better than women — that men are more likely to be trained to throw balls or that there is some neurological difference. A more likely explanation is that given the study’s small sample and very low difference, the real cause of the difference is the study design rather than any inherent ability to throw more accurately by either men or women.

Source:

Women ‘cannot throw’. Robert Uhlig, The Telegraph, October 12, 2000.