Women get HIV protection. What is an embargo break anyway? Tony Fauci explains the HIV gel. The climate for climate. Studying behavior is hard, but changing behavior is really hard. Frans de Waal explains that primates are excellent at conflict resolution.
VAGINAL GEL PREVENTS HIV INFECTION AND HSV-2 INFECTION TOO, ESPECIALLY WHEN WOMEN REALLY USE IT. Some good news this week for a change. Not only did BP's exploded oil well remain capped and apparently unleaky, researchers announced that a new vaginal gel containing the antiretroviral agent tenofovir can prevent HIV infection in women.
We forget, because the US infection pattern is different, that in much of the world people get infected with HIV mostly through plain old man-woman sexual intercourse. About half of HIV-infected people are women, and nearly all live in developing countries.
Katherine Harmon fills us in on the gel research at SciAm's Observations, and so does (invalid link) Merrill Goozner at Gooznews. The double-blind clinical trial, which studied nearly 900 South African women, found that the ones who used the gel properly before and after sex were 54% less likely to become infected with HIV than control women, who used a gel containing no drug. And even among the whole treated group, which included women who used the gel more intermittently, the overall rate of infection fell by 39%.
The same research yielded other good news too, as Nature's Spoonful of Medicine reports: the tenofovir gel also reduced a woman's chance of contracting herpes simplex virus-2 (HSV-2), one cause of genital herpes, by half. HSV-2 infection is more common in women than in men.
The gel is not at all perfect, but it's significantly better than nothing, which is what women have had until now, and it offers lots of hope for future improvements. Also, for the first time it puts control of exposure to HIV and HSV-2 risk in the hands of women themselves. They can use the gel without anyone else knowing — particularly a man who refuses to wear a condom.
For an HIV researcher's exultation at this most noteworthy development, see ERV, who also explains why there's no danger that the gel will produce a tenofovir-resistant human immunodeficiency virus. Nice, for a change, not to have to worry about that particular vicious circle with this new treatment.
WHEN IS AN EMBARGO BREAK NOT AN EMBARGO BREAK? The gel story also generated a brouhaha of more parochial interest. That flap posed a question that seems to me to have an obvious answer: Is a writer who publishes a story on embargoed research before the embargo lift guilty of breaking the embargo if he never saw the embargoed paper and, in fact, never even knew it existed? That's what Andrew Jack of the Financial Times did, and Ivan Oransky has been telling the tale all week at Embargo Watch. See here and here and here.
IMO, Jack is due several pats on the back for enterprise reporting rarely seen in our little science-writing universe — and apologies at least as obsequious as those being heaped on Shirley Sherrod. Both events being only the latest cautionary tales illustrating why we should all resist shooting off our mouths ahead of the facts despite the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle.
MEET TONY FAUCI, THE WORLD'S BEST EXPLAINER. It's not a blog, but it's sure relevant to what science writers do. Take a look at (invalid link) the News Hour's piece about the HIV gel, which includes an interview with Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and so is the nation's AIDS czar.
I don't know whether it's most scientists who aren't terribly good at talking about research to ignoramuses (=us), but it's certainly true that the ones who are brilliantly clear and simple explainers of research are few. Fauci is one of the best. Especially if you've never heard him, watch and learn.
THE END OF A CLIMATE EXPLAINER. Another noted explainer was climate scientist Stephen Schneider, who died this week. His death was all over the news, but you might want to take a look also at Joe Romm's long post at Climate Progress, which reprints a recent Schneider interview about that contentious paper showing that almost all climate scientists who publish regularly accept that the world is warming and largely because of us, whereas the deniers are much less professionally active. The post includes several minutes of video.
WILL THE CLIMATE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH AND POLICY CHANGE IN A THOUSAND YEARS? The National Academy of Sciences published another report on climate change this week, this one arguing that what is done now about carbon dioxide emissions will shape the Earth's history for the next thousand years or more. And ours, too, assuming H. sap is still around to see in the next millennium.
Bloggers don't seem to have taken much notice, perhaps because this one is just the latest in a string of gloomy prognostications arguing future doom to varying degrees. Says Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth:
The take-home message, directly in sync with the core findings of the last two assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, can be distilled to a fairly straightforward statement: Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide will result in long-lasting warming that will progressively produce more harmful impacts on conditions and systems that influence human wellbeing.
As I write, I learn that Congress's attempt to legislate controls on greenhouse gas emissions has failed.
THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE SCIENCE, HIV SCIENCE — AND MAYBE OTHER SCIENCE TOO. Revkin goes on to argue:
But of course these reviews of climate science butt up against a similarly robust body of psychological and sociological work showing how hard it is for information, even reliable authoritative information, to break through the barriers within the human mind (not to mention our polarized politics) that can impede rational risk management.
Influencing behavior will be a big part of future HIV prevention too, and I'm not talking here only about avoiding risky sex and using condoms. The gel trials show that women who used the gel faithfully were least likely to become infected, while those who did not succumbed more often. It would obviously be a Good Thing (tm) if all the women using the gel would use it correctly. How could that be achieved?
Which got me to thinking. Here are two situations where we have a handle, in some cases quite a good handle, scientifically speaking, on what should be done to save the Earth and to save lives. But effective action requires people to modify their behavior in (mostly slightly) unpleasant ways, to accept (mostly small) inconveniences and (mostly minor) discomforts for the sake of their own futures and that of their descendants. How many other cases are there where science has already suggested what to do, but we keep not doing it? Hundreds, probably thousands. Just one enormous example: the many many diseases in which you are what you eat, or fail to eat.
I don't know whether this means more behavioral research, or more behavioral research of particular kinds, or simply unearthing useful behavioral research that's already been done and figuring out acceptable ways to apply it to shape more healthful behavior. I write about behavioral genetics and neuroscience, but I am so ignorant of the social-science side of the behavioral literature that I can't even guess (she admitted, shamefaced.)
I am seeing a role for science writers here, at least in the unearthing part of the task. Revkin's post included a link to one he wrote a year ago about a long report the American Psychological Association did on psychology and climate change. (Don't follow the report link in the 2009 post, though, which will take you to a Scribd version. Go to the APA site here instead.)
This might be a place to start.
CROWDING DOES NOT LEAD TO SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION. Speaking of behavior, Big Name primatologist Frans de Waal is currently a guest blogger for Scientific American, writing a four-part series about, duh, primate behavior. This week's installment, No.2, based on rhesus monkey and chimpanzee research, debunks the widespread notion that crowding leads inevitably to social disintegration.
de Waal speculates that the aggression, murder, rape, and even cannibalism that occurred during a notorious rat experiment in the 1960s stemmed from limited resources resulting from crowding, not the crowding itself. "Primates," he says reassuringly, "are excellent at conflict resolution."
A comforting thought to conclude this week's episode. Except that a little voice keeps whispering, "Tell that to the folks in Afghanistan." Maybe we ought to stop shooting at Taliban members and try grooming them — picking through their hair and beards — instead.
