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January 15, 2012)
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Jan 9, 2012
The "Rocket Man"
musician founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation around 20 years ago to raise
funds to help fight the disease, and proceeds from "LOVE IS THE CURE:
Ending the Global AIDS Epidemic" will go to the charity.
In a statement released on
Monday, publishers Hodder & Stoughton promised a "very personal story
of ... Elton's life during the AIDS epidemic, including his agony at seeing
friend after friend perish needlessly."
Among the individuals it
describes are Mercury and Ryan White, an American boy who became a "poster
child" for HIV/AIDS after he was banned by a school because of his
condition.
According to reports at
the time, John was with White when he died in a
"This is a disease
that must be cured not by a miraculous vaccine, but by changing hearts and
minds, and through a collective effort to break down social barriers and to
build bridges of compassion," John said.
"Why are we not doing
more? This is a question I have thought deeply about, and wish to answer -- and
to help change -- by writing this book."
An estimated 34 million
people worldwide had the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS in
2010, up 17 percent on 2001 when 28.6 million were living with HIV.
According to the Hodder
statement, HIV/AIDS has claimed 60 million lives.
Hodder & Stoughton
acquired LOVE IS THE CURE with
It is due to be published
in July 2012 to coincide with the 2012 XIX International AIDS Conference to be
held in
(Reporting by Mike
Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
(AFP) – 11 January, 2012
LOS
ANGELES — Los Angeles city lawmakers voted to require porn actors to wear
condoms on set, the latest move in a battle between AIDS activists and the
California-based US adult film industry.
In a vote which must be
confirmed next week, the City Council approved by 11 to 1 an ordinance to
enforce the condom requirement and make companies pay a fee for a film permit to
finance inspections.
The vote came after the
AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has long campaigned for condom use on porn
sets, collected enough signatures to force LA city fathers either to pass the
ordinance, or organize a costly public vote.
AHF President Michael
Weinstein described the vote as a step toward regulating what he called the
"machine that was promoting unsafe sex" in the
But Nina Hartley, a
registered nurse and porn actress since 1984, blasted the ordinance.
She said adult film shoots
require sexual intercourse that lasts 30-60 minutes, and that wearing a condom
for that long would lead to chafing, open sores and a greater risk of
transmitting diseases.
"It's a disaster for
health and safety. I know it looks different from the outside, but it will not
work to protect anybody," she said.
Weinstein dismissed
warnings that the new LA ordinance would increase the number of illegal porn
shoots. "We don't not have regulations of restaurants because somebody is
going to have a hot dog cart that is unregulated," he said.
"We don't say that
you can build a skyscraper without any worker protections because somebody is
putting up drywall in somebody's garage," he added.
Film
Copyright © 2012 AFP. All
rights reserved.
By Suzana Markovic (AFP)
– 13 January, 2010
When he was diagnosed 10
years ago, Kovacic promptly informed the hospital where he worked as a nurse.
"They kept
transferring me from post to post. Finally, when they wanted me to work in the
hospital archives, a woman working there threatened to resign if I came,"
he said.
"I realised that I
had nothing to do there," 43-year-old Kovacic said. Instead he turned to
disability benefits for the chronically ill, which he began receiving six years
ago.
He is now an official of
USOP, an umbrella group of Serbian organisations helping people with HIV/AIDS.
"Because of stigma
and discrimination, people sometimes do not tell anyone that they are
HIV-positive," Kovacic said. "Knowing what I know now I am not sure I
would do so again."
Although the overall
infection rate is low in the Balkans region, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among
youths is increasing rapidly, according to non-governmental organisations.
Officially the registered
number of HIV-positive people is only 65 in
In Montenegro, a tiny
Adriatic state with only 660,000 inhabitants, the number of those infected has
increased by 33 percent from 2005 to 2009, official figures show.
"The pervasive stigma
and discrimination by health care providers and society at large against
high-risk populations -- and self-imposed isolation of people living with HIV
and AIDS -- further fuels the growth of the epidemic" in the western
Balkans, a health NGO, Fondation PH Suisse, said in a 2010 report.
While patients have no
trouble getting treatment and most countries of the former
Infected children or
children of infected parents are also not welcome in schools.
Local NGOs like USOP are
setting up a regional body to combat the prejudice. The first step will be a
special conference in April year dedicated to HIV-infected people and their way
of life where they will officially launch the initiative to start a regional
association.
"We realised, while
touring the region, that our problems were almost identical," said Vladimir
Antic of USOP.
For Tomislav Beganovic of
The lack of knowledge
about how the virus is transmitted often leads to isolation and discrimination
against people carrying the virus.
"They are often
excluded from a society, lose their job, they are deprived of their basic human
rights and education," said Tatjana Preradovic-Sjenica, a psychologist with
Viktorija, a Bosnian Serb non-government group in Banja Luka.
The prejudices also keep
many from getting tested, especially in
"We try to motivate
people to take a test," said Preradovic-Sjenica in
"Fear of being
identified or what the results of the test could be leads many people to
conclude it's better not to know," she said, even though the tests can be
taken anonymously and are free, as is treatment for infected patients.
In the Balkans region,
where traditional family values run deep, people living with HIV are often
shunned even by their own relatives.
Kovacic noted: "We do
not have any place to house people rejected by their families. They live in
hospitals until they die."
Copyright © 2012 AFP. All
rights reserved.