I had a sneak preview of Kaaron Warren's Slights, upcoming in July, and it's one of the most disturbing books I've read. I'd put it somewhere between American Psycho's and We Need to Talk Kevin. It's about a girl who accidentally kills her mother in a car accident and has a horrific near death experience where she confronts the ghosts of everyone she's ever slighted. The sense of sly menace keeps building, rending happy suburbia apart with shocking revelations, from an awful little old lady next door to the things she unearths in her obsessive excavation of her backyard that reveal disturbing clues to her past. It's brilliant, queasy-making storytelling, the kind that sticks with you, so the details might hit you again like a nasty flashback. www.angryrobotbooks.com
Aaaargh! To all those kneejerk responses to this being propaganda or bad science - I'd like to point out that as reported in the New Lancet and Nature Medicine and other highly reputable medical journals as well as in the mainstream media, there have been THREE DIFFERENT very well documented, scientifically scrutinised and peer reviewed studies in three different countries; Uganda, Kenya and South Africa (with between 2000-4000 people involved in each) all of which showed such dramatically positive and totally conclusive results in reducing HIV infection IN MEN that they were brought to a halt early.
The 60% protection rate beats out any of the hopeful predictions for an AIDS vaccine, which is still 7-10 years away, after the last batch of vaccines failed.
Sure, condoms are a much better prevention strategy (particularly when circumcision doesn't affect transmission - so they can still pass it on), but snipping off the foreskin could be the kindest cut in an epidemic that is absolutely destroying Africa, particularly when we've just seen dramatic horrific failures in the trials of microbicides based on nonoxynol-9 (ie. a vaginal jelly shield) and the most recent batch of vaccines.
While scientists are working on new strategies, circumcision in the meantime could well help save the continent (ideally as part of a strategy that involves condoms and other preventative measures).
Mmmm, reminds me of the big bad old days of apartheid in South Africa where activists protesting the evil National Party regime were sprayed with purple dye so they could be easily identified and arrested - the activists responded by printing up a batch of t-shirts that afternoon that read "The Purple Shall Govern."
My friend Nikki who works as a care clown in South Africa with children in hospital (and the Red Cross Burns unit in particular) found that the less make-up you wear the better. The kids need to be able to see your expression. They're already in a scary awful situation suffering terrible burns or living with tuberculosis or HIV or serious injury and the last thing they need is some freak caked in so much facepaint as to appear inhuman.
The 60% protection rate beats out any of the hopeful predictions for an AIDS vaccine, which is still 7-10 years away, after the last batch of vaccines failed.
Sure, condoms are a much better prevention strategy (particularly when circumcision doesn't affect transmission - so they can still pass it on), but snipping off the foreskin could be the kindest cut in an epidemic that is absolutely destroying Africa, particularly when we've just seen dramatic horrific failures in the trials of microbicides based on nonoxynol-9 (ie. a vaginal jelly shield) and the most recent batch of vaccines.
While scientists are working on new strategies, circumcision in the meantime could well help save the continent (ideally as part of a strategy that involves condoms and other preventative measures).
We're talking about people's lives here.