Memo to New York Times Copydesk: HIV Prevention Means *Not* Sharing Needles…

Maia Szalavitz

Here’s a whopper from today’s New York Times, in an article on how the world is failing at HIV prevention by failing to use measures to push behavioral change:

Dr. Adeeba Kamarulzaman of Malaysia said that outside Africa, about 30 percent of H.I.V. infections were among intravenous drug users. But because of stigma and a lack of resources, the world is failing to provide measures like methadone and needle sharing that can help such people.

Somehow, we doubt Dr. Kamarulzaman meant that H.I.V. positive Africans should share needles, and as this is paraphrase and not direct quotation, there is no reason not to correct what is, from a medical perspective, an example of misspeaking. So we are left with the irony that a doggedly literal-minded copy desk has managed to give really bad, and possibly fatal, advice in an article supposedly about the failure to advise people how to avoid contracting H.I.V…

What Makes Some Voles Monogamous And Why You Should Care

STATS Maia Szalavitz reports on MSN Health and Fitness about some interesting research showing that the biological basis for monogamy lies in the hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin:

In prairie voles, oxytocin seems to wire in a connection between one particular partner and pleasure (another chemical, vasopressin, is needed as well in males); prairie voles are monogamous creatures.

But promiscuous montane voles don’t have much of these crucial chemicals in their brain’s pleasure areas—to them, any partner goes.

So, at least in voles, oxytocin and vasopressin are the stuff that love is made of.

There has been much speculation that humans taking oxytocin together would fall in love—but in experiments with hundreds of subjects, so far this hasn’t happened, in either women or men…”

This is probably a good thing: people forging relationships on the basis of having consumed a drug sounds like an awful idea. But this doesn’t mean that research into oxytocin is a waste of time – it may not be a love drug, but it might just help people socialize… more