New in the Mail

Today, coming to work, I saw A Very Short Introduction: HIV/AIDS, by Alan Whiteside in my mailbox. It cost me just under ten bucks, but I'd forgotten I'd ordered it. I bought it for a new project - one that has been pushed back - and am hoping it is as good a primer as I'd wanted. Table 3, though, wasn't as carefully done as I'd hoped. It lists the different transmission rates by sexual contact, and compresses "male to male transmission" into one category, when normally I've seen it separated into "anal receptive intercourse" and "anal insertive intercourse." This is a better way of explaining it to me, because this focuses the transmission rate on a specific kind of act, and not merely a gendered pairing, for which there are numerous acts. For instance, "male-to-female transmission" is also listed by itself, but anal receptive intercourse for a female is, I think, comparable in risk to that of a male participating in anal receptive intercourse. So, if there are practices which are variable by, for instance, area of the country, ethnicity or even places in the world, then the "male-to-female transmission" isn't all that helpful. For instance, it would be nice to also see this broken down by countries in Africa, as I've seen male-to-female transmission rates reported in Africa which are hundreds of times higher than that of rates reported in the United States, which makes one wonder if sexual acts differ in African countries than here among heterosexual pairings. Again, maybe not, but risk of infection should be identified with the specific sexual act, and not simply the proximate gender pairings, since it's not the gendered pairings that gives the risk, but rather, the sexual acts correlated with those pairings (like anal sex and homosexuality).

Still, this looks useful and is probably a decent primer. I look forward to reading it.