I meant to post this yesterday and now invoke my ethnic background to excuse my tardiness.

While my laptop’s already suffering from too much spyware to withstand finding a cure for HIV, I did want to note World AIDS Day in some way. Via Anupam Chander, I see that HIV+ women in Golaghat, Assam joined a rally “to acknowledge they are living with AIDS and should not be shunned.” From what I can tell, India is doing surprisingly well, particularly compared to some African nations, in admitting its HIV crisis. When I last visited in 2003, there were bilboards with giant pictures of condoms, which is something I’ve never seen even in Houston or Dallas, where conservatism appear to be greater than in Bombay and Hyderabad. Though the government is unwilling to say just how big the population of HIV+ Indians is — as a NYT editorial puts it, “India is providing numbers no one believes” — it has not gone through the lengthy period of denial that the U.S. government did in the 1980s, which allowed HIV to threaten to become epidemic among margnialized groups.

The problem now is getting treatment to sufferers, and unlike the issue of accepting the existence of the disease (though that certainly is far from complete, and contributes to the difficulty of accessing treatment), seems likely to get worse, not better. The WTO is supposed to be giving developing nations more time to comply with patent rules, but Indian already reformed its laws last year. This has had the benefit of drawing large pharmaceutical companies who previously feared that their investments would be unprotected. On the downside, however, are millions of Indians who cannot afford the cost of a patented drug and whose salvation previously had been the cheap generics that local drug makers had pirated. Continue reading →

In 1998, Nidha Mubdi, a student at St. John’s University in New York, discovered during a routine checkup that she had leukemia. After much searching through SAMAR, a donor named Himesh Kapadia stepped forward:

The bone marrow donation saved her life, but Mubdi’s kidneys began failing because of chemotherapy, and she’s been on dialysis for the last five years. But earlier this month, Derek Ivery, a friend from Queens College, gave her one of his kidneys, a much more serious operation:

Mubdi’s family members were tested to see if they could donate a kidney, but no one came up as a match. [Link]

Ivery, of Queens, decided to step forward after Mubdi put out a call for a donor on the Internet. They had met when when they were student advisers at Queens College… Mubdi’s grateful father, Shelley Mubdi, a Bangladeshi immigrant who is president of Medina Masjid, a Manhattan mosque, called Ivery, a “courageous man…”

Ivery, 26, and Mubdi, 25, were resting comfortably at New York Presbyterian/Columbia Hospital last night after the nine-hour operation. [Link]

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A new study shows that meditation lets you close popup ads faster (via Boing Boing):

The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond… meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

“Every single subject showed improvement… Why it improves performance, we do not know.” The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice. [Link]

Not to mention bigger head muscle:

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing”. [Link]

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Turnabout’s fair play: Now the Indian cosmetics industry is targeting mattar-sexuals with a skin lightener for men.

The advert for the male cream shows a dark-skinned college boy relegated to the back seat and ignored by the girls until he uses the product. Soon enough, his complexion lightens and girls flock to him like moths to a flame…

Until now, skin-lightening creams have been aimed almost exclusively at women. This is the first launched nationally for men… Called Fair and Handsome, the advertisement for the product gives the message: be fair or remain in dark oblivion…

“A look at the matrimonial section… there’s not one guy who admits to being dark and attractive, they just say we are wheatish and fair. So there is just not one dark-skinned person in this country, they are all rolling wheat fields of masculinity.” [Link]

Naomi Wolf penned an interesting polemic on this subject in The Beauty Myth. She says many cosmetics companies fund women’s mags which are largely designed to make girls feel insecure about their looks. The industry appropriates the sheen of science (white lab coats in department stores, medicalized vocabulary like ‘invisible damage to your skin’) when many of them are really peddling snake oil. The more successful they are at creating a culture of hypochondria and medicalized insecurity, the more product they move.

Many industries besides cosmetics use fear in advertising. However, it’s far more damaging when it hits women’s self-confidence instead of something more neutral like their feelings about, say, consumer appliances.

Continue reading →