The HIV denial movement has for the most part been a silly sideshow, an irritating distraction, to the massive international research effort into preventing AIDS. That’s in the West, though, where public health officials tend to be appointed on their merits. In Africa, the HIV denial movement is not limited to a handful of shonky scientists, but includes the President and the health minister of South Africa. The South African government just announced a major change of heart: it will now be looking at scientific approaches to the prevention of AIDS, including anti-retroviral drugs for the poor and credible sex education. Of particular note is that this announcement has come from the deputy president, not the President himself or the health minister, so it is hard to gauge how seriously to take it. But even if it is genuine, it is far too late for millions of Africans. Depending on the study, the prevalence of HIV in South Africa ranges from 11% to 25% of adults. And by denying the scientific basis of AIDS, the South African government has given credibility to folk medicine, which includes the contemptible belief that having sex with a virgin will cure men of HIV — the result being a surge in child rape cases by HIV-positive men.

Well, you might say, that’s Africa. It couldn’t happen here…

But it could. In fact, it’s happening right now, albeit on a much, much smaller scale. A West Australian man convicted of risking women’s lives through sexual contact will base his appeal on HIV denial. According to ABC Online:

Andre Chad Parenzee is awaiting sentence for having unprotected sex with three women who were unaware he was carrying the HIV virus.

But his lawyer, Kevin Borick, today argued that Parenzee’s conviction should be quashed because there is no scientific proof that HIV actually exists.

Mr Borick will call evidence from two Western Australian based scientists, who will argue that the virus has never been isolated, current testing regimes are inconclusive and that there is no proof HIV is transmitted sexually.

Australia is never going to face the disaster that is facing South Africa. When I say this is on a smaller scale, it’s like a teaspoon to South Afrrica’s ocean. We have a public health system that, whatever its flaws, strives to implement the best available scientific evidence, without political or financial corruption, and the Australian population is reasonably knowledgeable about HIV so rogue opinions are unlikely to gain a beachhead. But even if HIV denial never takes hold in the wider community, as long as there are damn fool scientists prepared to dress up their unfounded opinions as courageous skepticism, there will be a small number of individuals who will seize on those opinions and act as if they were true because they want them to be true.

It is, I hope, unlikely that Mr Parenzee’s appeal will succeed. But even if it fails, it appears that at least one lawyer is prepared to make the case and at least two scientists are prepared to testify in support, and this is all it takes to create a seed of doubt. The MMR-autism crisis in the UK was sparked by a single scientist despite the rapid and forceful debunking by every medical expert and public health body in England.

Next time you think HIV denial is a big problem for Africa but a mere lunatic fringe in Australia, you may be interested to know that even into the 1920s it was a common belief among British and European men that having sex with a virgin would cure sexual infections. As the saying goes, old fallacies never die. They just change their spots. Ask yourself how you would feel about HIV denial if you or your daughter were in the same position as the three women of Mr Parenzee’s acquaintance.

Imagine that a multi-million dollar drug company secured a deal with a local council to trial a product on schoolchildren. Imagine that the drug is marketed as improving children’s concentration and learning, but has no reliable evidence behind it. Imagine that the “trial” turns not to have a control arm, which means the study can’t actually measure the effect of the drug. Imagine, further, that the company arranged the trial as part of a major marketing drive aimed at parents keen to improve their children’s school grades.

Imagine, to raise another situation, that a sector of the health industry is pressuring government into relaxing marketing laws so that they can sell products with health claims for which they have no scientific evidence. Imagine that they can label their products as “alleviating cancer” or “for the treatment of diabetes” even if there is no evidence to demonstrate the promised benefit. Imagine that the government goes along with this, explaining that this is not to help the public but to expand the market.

Would there be outrage? Would newspaper editorials thunder about the wickedness and greed of the drug company? Would the Opposition rise up and demand protection of the public against misleading health claims? The answer, demonstrably, is no. These two scenarios are taking place right now in the UK, and the only protest is coming from the medical scientific community and is largely being ignored by journalists and politicians. If anything, the media are giving the drug company lots of uncritical support, adding to its marketing power, and generating supportive quotes from the Education Authority. Meanwhile, the watering down of the health marketing laws passed without public or parliamentary debate.

How is it possible for a multi-million dollar drug company to get away with a dubious, marketing-driven pseudo-trial on schoolchildren? Well, the drug that brings in their their millions is fish oil. How is it possible for a multi-billion dollar industry to get away with having laws rewritten to allow them to invent health claims, for instance promising to protect travellers from malaria with untested medicines? Because the industry in question is homeopathy.

More on the fish oil pseudo-trial here, here, and here. More on homeopathy clinics selling untested preventives for malaria here. For those who want to know why testing a product on low-performing children without a control group is a bad idea, read about regression to the mean.

This is not fiction! Google Maps has inescapable photographic evidence of a giant insect feeding on a field west of the German town of Hülen.

It is difficult to know what to say in these troubling times. Perhaps the best advice comes from the Pharyngula comments page:

I, for one, welcome our new earwig overlords.

(via Inoculated Mind via Pharyngula)

According to the US Social Security database, the 937th most popular girl’s name of 2005 was “Unique.”

Deconstructing the alien: Blindsight by Peter Watts

In 1999 Canadian author Peter Watts made a big splash with Starfish, his ‘New York Times Notable Book of the Year-listed’ debut thriller about a group of misfit bio-engineered humans sent deep underwater by a multinational corporation to harness the geothermal energy of Channer vent on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. This time Watts turns his attention upwards, tackling the starscapes of outer space rather than undersea, bringing with him the biologist’s eye view that made the Starfish trilogy so compelling, disturbing and utterly fascinating.

The year is 2082. Alien ‘fireflies’ have surveyed the Earth, taken a snapshot of life upon it, and, in doing so, alerted humankind to their presence. Radio signals from the Kuiper belt reveal their possible location – and leave humankind in a state of panic.

The team sent to investigate and initiate first contact is not your regular group of likely literary heroes: Siri Keaton, synthesist, a man incapable of experiencing empathy since half his brain was cut out in a childhood hemispherectomy to combat the seizures of viral epilepsy; Isaac Szpindel, a biologist hardwired with extreme body modification; Susan James, a linguist whose personality has been surgically partitioned into four separate entities referred to as the Gang of Four; Major Amanda Bates, a soldier with treason scarring her record; — and Jukka Sarasti commanding them all in conjunction with the ship itself, Theseus, a quantum computer AI. Jukka Sarasti is a vampire. Yes, that’s right, as in the fanged, blood-drinking variety. A genuine monster reconstituted through genetic manipulation, heading up earth’s attempt at first contact with an alien ship that has named itself Rorschack and may or may not be sentient. And dangerous.

As in Starfish, Watts has once again envisioned a group of freaks as protagonists — a strange choice of crew to represent humanity, perhaps? Not when you consider how things are going back home on Earth. Two-party nonvirtual sex pairing has become almost irrelevant. Close to a generation of people, including Siri Keaton’s own mother, have opted to place their bodies in storage and ascend to ‘Heaven’ to live out their lives immersed in their own personalities. Humanity is a couple of years away from the Singularity — reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment — when suddenly aliens appear, Earth panics and global priorities change overnight.

Siri Keaton and his crewmates are awoken from hibernation to find themselves deep in the Oort, confronted by an Oasa emitter: Big Ben, a quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters. Behind it, hidden from plain view, lurks a city-sized alien spacecraft that physically “embodies the very notion of torture”. Communication between the two species begins. But the linguist Susan James soon suspects that Rorschack, despite its ability to converse with them in Earth languages, might not be intelligent at all. It might be pattern matching rather than comprehending. Rorschack is growing before their eyes, sucking up matter from Big Ben’s accretion belt, inflicting hallucinations and dysfunctions on the Theseus crew. But is it hostile, friendly or indifferent? Even when it threatens Susan, the crew remains unsure of Rorschack’s abilities and intentions.

In an effort to find answers, the crew, sans vampire, board Rorschack and brave its deadly internal environment in search of clues. They soon encounter creatures with the ability to be seen or not seen by human eyes – and accidentally kill one of them. Investigation of the carcass shows the creature to be sophisticated, but not intelligent. They go back for a couple of live “scrambler” specimens to study: creatures so alien they possess neither brains nor genes. It is soon determined that the only way to force these creatures to communicate is to hurt them.
This novel explores and questions the advantages we presume exist in being human. What is intelligence actually good for, biologically speaking?

The first contact scenario has been played out hundreds of times in speculative fiction cinema, literature and television. When the aliens get here, will they be our friends? Benevolent masters intent on saving humankind from its own self-destructive ways? Or rampaging armies of cyborg/insect warrior soldiers wiping us out because genocide is what they do? Will we be their allies or their lunch? It is often presumed the aliens will be smarter than us from sheer necessity: if they aren’t hyper intelligent, how will they ever find us amidst all that interstellar dust? One fact almost always presumed is a common point of reference: a way to make contact. From the software compatible aliens of Independence Day to the Relics of Rama, some sense can usually be fathomed of it all at some point between the humans and the aliens and their intentions. But what if it can’t be? What are the advantages to being human? What if there aren’t any?

“You’re not so much successful as isolated from any real competition,” says the vampire to Siri Keaton. What if he’s right about that?

On earth, the strangest creatures of all live in the sea. No one could be better placed than a marine biologist to ask the hard questions about life itself and envision a seed from the murky depths of space. Being used to those most alien of creatures, Watts has worked out his scenario in exquisite detail: from the vampire’s crucifix glitch (and resulting aversion to Euclidian geometry) to the telematter drive that propels Theseus into the Oort to confront the alien.

This is a smart book, worth reading for the ideas it contains alone: hard SF at its hardest. Watts surfs the cutting edge of technological exploration, weaving his future humans from the dark edges of today’s research and development. His protagonists are hard to like, but easy to believe in as they navigate through the minefield of communicating with the other: knowing their mistakes could have devastating consequences for earth.

Leonaur Press is a small UK outfit that publishes beautiful books mostly in the science fiction, fantasy, and military genres. It’s great to see someone keeping Stanley Weinbaum in print and this month Leonaur is bringing out a selection of Burroughs’s gleefully Victorian adventure books, including Carter of Mars. The covers for the SF and fantasy lines are a little generic, but boy do they have some designs for the military line.

Brimstone Press has announced that the Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror 2006 will be released in late November. It will be available through retail stores and specialty shops in Australia, or you can order online. Here are the contents:

• “Pater Familias” by Lee Battersby
• “The Memory of Breathing” by Lyn Battersby
• “Heart of Saturday Night” by Adam Browne
• “The Interminable Suffering of Mysterious Mr Wu” by Rjurik Davidson
• “Horror Literature & Censorship in Australia” by James Doig
• “The Red Priest’s Homecoming” by Dirk Flinthart
• “Aspect Hunter” by Anthony Fordham
• “Malik Rising” by Paul Haines
• “The Greater Death of Saito Saku” by Richard Harland
• “The State of the Zombie Film” by Robert Hood
• “Tumble” by Trent Jamieson
• “Body Parts” by Chris Lawson
• “The Outback Bites Back” by David Levell
• “Hooked” by Martin Livings
• “Eight-Beat Bar” by Chuck McKenzie
• “The Dark Shadow of Fantasy” by Josephine Pennicott
• “Fresh Young Widow” by Kaaron Warren

(Via Panda’s Thumb) The Lutheran has an interview with Judge Jones, the conservative Republican and devout Lutheran who ruled against intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board this year. There is little new in the interview, but it does provide some nice succinct quotes.

On whether he should have ruled on the validity of ID as science:

“Both sides asked me to render a decision on that precise issue,” he said. “Had I not done so, there was every chance that this same issue would have arisen before another tribunal. I didn’t think a school district somewhere else should be exposed to the costs and fees that the Dover School District ended up paying (more than $1 million) as a result of my ducking that issue.”

On whether he had “stabbed in the back” the Republicans who appointed him:

“The decision had nothing to do with politics and polls,” he said. “It is entirely appropriate for the executive and legislative branches of government to respond to the will of the people. But as a federal judge, I’m charged with focusing on legal precedents, the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. My work has everything to do with reviewing the evidence as presented in the courtroom and legal precedents, such as Supreme Court tests used in previous establishment clause cases.”

On being called an “activist” judge:

“If I had disregarded the facts and invented a new test, other than those tests offered by the Supreme Court, that would have made me an activist judge. These values are not Republican or Democratic. They are American values.”

Apropos my previous post on politics:

“I have a great concern about the extreme ways people react to difficult issues,” Jones said. “We need to find a way to elevate the debate about difficult issues in our culture. The discussion is frequently marked by rank incivility that tears at our system of government and justice. We need to recover the ability to agree to disagree, to argue politely.”

To celebrate Horror Day (that’s today!), Martin Livings and Stephanie Gunn compiled a horror anthology in less than 24 hours. This may be a world record. Despite the short notice, stories shuffled in (and devoured every living creature in the vicinity) from Stephen Dedman, Robert Hood, Chuck McKenzie, Cat Sparks, and many others.

Go to the Horror Day Anthology.

Avril Lavigne covers “Chop Suey” by System of a Down

There are too many bad cover versions to even attempt a listing, so I’ve tried to avoid obvious cases where there is simply a talent gap between the original performers and the cover band. But this is something else. It’s so bad it’s actually painful to hear. “Chop Suey” is a gratingly pompous, prog-metal song to begin with. It has been covered many times, almost always as parody. Filipino band Parokya ni Edgar even recorded a version (“The Ordertaker”) about a man in a restaurant angrily demanding to be served his food. Ms Lavigne must have seen something in the song. Perhaps she was just having a spot of fun. But what comes out, quite simply, gives acoustic neuroma a good name. WARNING! Do not clean ear drums with a wire brush afterwards!

Billy Bragg covers “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward” by Billy Bragg

The original version is one of the great songs of the 20th century. On top of its strong melodic progression, it has some of the most potent lyrics ever penned for a political song. It’s about the difficulty of holding onto hope while the Thatchers and the Reagans are on the rise. Then something terrible happened. Bragg got what he wanted. Thatcher was thrown out of office and the Tories gutted themselves in the election that followed. You can’t blame a man for wanting to celebrate, but did Bragg really have to rewrite the lyrics and traipse from stage to stage with his guitar belting out a new version? The old message was “When you’re on the ropes, be strong.” The new message is, “When the enemy has self-destructed, be a smug, superior prick.”

Elton John covers “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John

Elton John could still crank out show tunes for Disney, but the spark of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was gone. When he wanted a fitting tribute to his friend Lady Diana, he dusted off “Candle in the Wind”, renovated the arrangement a little, and painted over Bernie Taupin’s 24-year old lyrics with a thick layer of plaster of pap. To Elton John’s credit, he did so with Taupin’s blessing and he gave the profits to charity. His heartbreak was genuine, and apart from Diana’s funeral he has played only the 1973 version in concert. But how could he not see that he should have written a new tune for Diana? Even if it wasn’t his best work, even if there wasn’t time, at least it would be for her. “Candle in the Wind” was already taken, a melancholy love song to the memory of Marilyn Monroe. It used to be one of the touchstone tragedies in pop music. Now it’s a generic tearjerker. Goodbye, insert name.

William Shatner covers “Mr Tambourine Man” by Bob Dylan

I know it’s an obvious pick. But you can’t go past it. As Danny Oz once told me, there are many versions of Dylan’s timeless classic…and this is the stalker with the DTs version. The ending gets me every time.

Shannon Noll covers “What About Me?” by Moving Pictures

“What about me? It isn’t fair. Everything is like so unreasonable, you know? Why won’t anyone pay any attention to what I’m saying? I’m like the lead singer in this cool band, and I have a message for the world about the time I was a kid and I had a job serving in a corner shop and it was like boring and it wasn’t as much fun as playing guitar and the manager wanted me spend like hours behind the counter…” God, what a whinefest! The only thing more depressing than the original song is knowing that the Shannon Noll version spent four unforgiveable weeks at #1 in the Australian charts. Noll can sing, and that only makes the travesty worse. Forget the old stories about Aussie grit and the pioneer spirit. We’re a nation of spineless whingers.

Celine Dion covers “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC

Multipart vocal harmonies? A guitar break as flat as an overcooked souffle? A woman with curtain tassels flowing from her sleeves doing the Angus hop in high heels? There is no God.

Counting Crows cover “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell

Listen to Joni Mitchell live, just her and the microphone. Now listen to the Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton massacre “Big Yellow Taxi” with all the resources of a modern studio behind them. Proof, if ever it was needed, that no amount of slick engineering, complex arrangement, and trying-too-hard-to-be-cool marketing can beat one person with a voice, a guitar, and a clue about how to work the song.