Michelle Goldberg on Mark Dybul's Departure
Michelle Goldberg offers a rich account of Mark Dybul's departure from the Office of Global AIDS Coordinator on The American Prospect.
Goldberg examines the differences between Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton's and President Barack Obama's leadership styles and how that could affect PEPFAR and the US's stance on global HIV prevention:
Obama, after all, has, like Dybul, made working with faith-based groups a major priority. He's eager for bipartisan support, even if it means sacrificing parts of his own agenda. Clinton, seared by many years of ideological warfare, is less concerned with placating her opponents. She thrilled feminists worldwide at the 1995 Beijing conference when she proclaimed, "Women's rights are human rights, once and for all." As secretary of state, she's promised to foreground women's issues, including sexual and reproductive health, which is one reason that, while foreign-policy conservatives were sanguine about her confirmation, social conservatives largely were not.
And:
The recent uproar over family-planning provisions in the stimulus bill have shown how eager the right is to demagogue on sexual issues. Should Clinton push forward with more effective prevention policies, the consensus that has sustained the massive American commitment to AIDS relief could fray. So far, though, keeping that consensus together has come at the cost of some women's lives.
Stem Cell Transplant Appears to Free Patient of HIV
CNN reports: "A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine."
Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany, to treat the man's leukemia, not the HIV itself.
However, the team deliberately chose a compatible donor who has a naturally occurring gene mutation that confers resistance to HIV. The mutation cripples a receptor known as CCR5, which is normally found on the surface of T cells, the type of immune system cells attacked by HIV.
But while successful, the treatment likely won't be widely applicable: "About a third of the people die [during such transplants], so it's just too much of a risk," Dr. Jay Levy, professor at UC San Francisco. "To perform a stem cell transplant, doctors intentionally destroy a patient's immune system, leaving the patient vulnerable to infection, and then reintroduce a donor's stem cells (which are from either bone marrow or blood) in an effort to establish a new, healthy immune system."
Condom Sales Going Up
On Slate, William Saletan observes that condom sales are increasing, and he theorizes that's because Americans want to "control the family payroll." "I'd like to think that when times are tough, people become increasingly rational and careful about limiting their financial commitments, especially when the welfare of existing children is at stake," writes Saletan. But: "the part about condoms being a 'relatively inexpensive form of birth control' worries me. Including a barrier method is generally a good idea. But if people are cutting back on more foolproof contraception and relying entirely on condoms, there's always a risk that one screw-up will lead to pregnancy." True. I wish Congresss and Obama had thought of that when the jettisoned the family planning provision from the stimulus package.
Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Inspires Skepticism
On The American Prospect, Sarah Posner is more than skeptical about the newly-reconstituted Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships:
Despite Obama's own lip service to nonbelievers in his Inaugural Address, the inclusion of leaders from nonreligious organizations on this advisory council, and the presence of the word "neighborhood" alongside "faith based" in his new partnership between government and community, this is without a doubt a religious endeavor. Why else would he have chosen the venue of the National Prayer Breakfast -- an event whose origins and true agenda Obama either chose to overlook, doesn't understand, or does understand but nonetheless embraced in the long-standing spirit of phony bipartisanship that the prayer breakfast represents -- to make his first public announcement about the office, followed by a private signing of the executive order at the White House?
Posner adds:
[Obama] did not, as many had hoped he'd do, reverse two Bush-era executive orders that permitted employment discrimination by federally funded religious organizations and the direct funding of houses of worship. Instead, the executive order he did sign authorizes the director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the advisory council to refer particular cases to White House counsel and the Department of Justice for legal review.
Utah House Approves Anti-Abortion Legal Fund
One of the reasons Utah lawmakers have not moved forward on an abortion ban in the state has been awareness of the cost of defending the ban in court. Now, the House has approved a proposal that would set up a "legal defense fund" to fund a challenge Roe with a state abortion ban, the AP reports. "House Bill 114 would create a fund that accepts private donations to help offset any legal fees the state would incur if it were to pass an abortion ban by 2014. Defending a law that bans abortion in most cases would likely cost the state millions of dollars." But the last similar efforts raised on $13,000. The Senate votes next on the proposal.
