Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Digg users and their misguides views about HIV...

I don't want to bite the hand that feeds. Don't get me wrong. Although come to think about it - All Scrubbed Up has never been super digg'd. But here's to hoping.

I keep an eye on our Medically Dugg section bottom right of this blog. It's always interesting to see what mass audiences of voting as the interesting medical stories of the day. Some are great. Some... Well.

Take this one for example. It popped up a few days ago and tries to lay a groundwork for supporting the fact that circumcision might INCREASE the chance on contracting HIV. We argued differently. And there's a reason.


Scientists found that infected men who resumed sexual activity before their circumcision wounds healed were more likely to spread the virus than infected men who didn't have the surgery.

"This is a complicated situation ... but it seems that HIV-positive men initiating sex before wound healing is potentially dangerous for transmitting HIV," said Dr. Kevin M. De Cock, head of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS department.

Oh. My. Now THAT's a mind-blowing glimpse of the bloody obvious.


The results of the research so far are not statistically significant, scientists noted.


Oh. Really? Excuse the sarcasm!

I guess I'm ticked for 3 reasons. One. We've never been super digg'd - but dangerous, stupid articles like this do. Two. The articles add fuel to an already full fire - on a subject where too many non-medical people care to make medical judgement. Three. We've never been super digg'd.

5 comments:

Champagne Heathen said...

I have no idea what Diggs are so I'll just ignore that part of the post.

These findings are not too significant to the media & public, other than for being unnecessarily sensational as you point out. Rather, it shows us AIDS Prevention people the many complexities we will need to address around circumcision in terms of HIV prevention.

Also, circumcision should never be thought of as a primary means of HIV prevention, & so those men who engaged in sex 'too soon' will need to be REtrained not only to not engage in sex following surgery (abstain for just a few weeks forgodsake!), but to WEAR A CONDOM or BE FAITHFUL!! Argh.

Andy Hadfield said...

Diggs are the cornerstone of the argument - allow me to indulge. Digg.com is a tool that let's it's many hundreds of thousands of users vote on stories they think are interesting. Cute tool. Very powerful. The trick with Digg is that it's SO popular that if you get voted up enough, like this story did, you stand to receive tens of thousands, if not MILLIONS of visitors - all reading your story.

It's like an all pervasive media form.

An article like this are dangerous to expose without some medical guidance to a million people.

That's our issue I guess.

Champagne Heathen said...

Aaah, now I see. Kinda like that MUTI thing I only recently discovered. Andy! You are meant to keep techno-clueless me on top of these things.

I first read an article about this in a newspaper, & then received it over email. Sensationalism & simplification is a danger in all three of these mediums. Lets hope all influential people who read it do some further research before concluding anything.

Andy Hadfield said...

Amen

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