Best Posts in Forum: Mental, Medical and Sexual Health

You already know what I am going through... First time away from my family on Thanksgiving under these circumstances since I came out to my parents. My dad is actually the only one that has some type of interaction with me. My mom does not even return calls or text messages. It is something else. I sometimes wonder if I will spend Christmas holidays alone in Florida for the first time away from my family in Texas but I am taking it one day at a time. I just need to be strong...

Thanks for having a huge heart and your continued support!

 

I had a very rude awakening two weeks ago today. I am very self-aware, knowledgeable about random shit, and a pretty smart guy, and I just KNEW what was going on with me these last few months as I've struggled in my doctoral program.

I haven't been able to focus or pay attention worth crap lately. Although this has been a recurring issue throughout life, over the last few months it has become debilitating. According to my own reasoning, my inability to focus and complete my work, gave me a LOT of anxiety and eventually, I'd end up depressed. I thought I had ADHD. I did all the research, went through tons of assessments, saw a psychologist and paid a nice bit of change to finally get a diagnosis. I got the diagnosis I thought I needed, but when I went to see the black lady psychiatrist, she said, "I'm not going to treat you for ADHD. I think there's something more there."

I was frustrated and she could tell.

As we continue on, I'm stuck on this ADHD thing and she's just taking notes, asking questions, and extracting stuff from me that I had buried away for years. "Oh you have a little PTSD going on," she said. Then casually, she says, "You have bipolar disorder, it's mild, but that's what I'm going to treat you for."

I did not wrap my head around what she said until I got home and started doing my research. I was more frustrated at not having ADHD than being upset with the diagnosis I actually got. Then when I started to read and process what bipolar disorder was, and as I reflected, I became relieved to finally have an answer to what was going on with me. But that soon gave way to mourning the fact that I've been dealing with this for now 21 years, and I'm JUST realizing it. I had my first depressive episode my freshman year of college and it lasted the entire fall semester. But I was clueless as to what was going then.

On the flip side of the depressive state, there's the manic side of bipolar. I technically have bipolar 2, which means that I suffer from hypomania, as opposed to all out mania. This basically means that my symptoms are much more mild and subtle. But one symptom of the manic side that is not mild or subtle to me is hypersexuality. While I thought I was just SUPER horny ALL THE TIME, and while I will never disclose how "tongue in cheek" some of my sexual experiences have been, how much I've jacked off, and how much porn i look at, I now understand that this ridiculous sex drive is driven by the manic side of bipolar disorder. Also the speeding, being verbally abusive if someone "sets me off" and all the creative projects I completed in the middle of the night were also signs of manic episodes that i would not have attributed to anything had I not gotten a diagnosis.

I am still adjusting to the idea that I have this disorder, ESP after always hearing about it and even knowing a couple folks with it, but not having a full understanding of it. One thing life has taught is that you can never judge a book by a cover AND that you never really know what is going on with a person or what a person is dealing with. I don't look like I have issues, and my life has been lived as such. I have 4 degrees already, have had success in my career, and worked my dream job. Nevertheless, I find myself among a category of people whom I'm even guilty of looking at "differently."

Well, I am different...and always knew I was, but not in this way. I still have my moments of sadness because this is all still fresh, but I've accepted my diagnosis, and I AM GETTING TREATED! Thankfully, the black lady shrink started me on a drug that has caused almost no side effects and began working the first day! Because I am industrious and determined to get/be better I've been able to get care through more than one provider, despite not having health insurance right now. And I have been blessed to have a great committee chair for my dissertation, and supportive and understanding professors in my program.

I am EXTREMELY private, but I've needed a form of catharsis since I've been diagnosed and Cypher Ave came to mind as the place for that. (Thanks Nick and Ocky again for establishing this platform for us.) I appreciate y'all for allowing me to share and thank you for reading. Despite being private, I am open about my life's experiences when asked. If you have questions, wanna talk or just need some reassurance, hit me up.

Here are a couple resources. I like this lady.

 

Big Sean shares anxiety and depression struggle

Big Sean has spoken about his struggle with anxiety and depression, which forced him to cancel a tour in 2018.

Sean revealed that he went through a difficult period last year around his 30th birthday.

He says that around that time, he realised he was facing issues which needed "special attention" and had therapy for his problems.

"I wasn't feeling like myself and I couldn't figure out why," he said on Instagram.

"I just felt lost - and I don't know how I got there."

He posted three videos on his social media, in which he spoke openly about his experiences.



He previously scrapped a US tour last year partly because of his mental health, telling Billboard magazine at the time: "I never really took the time out to nurture myself."

Sean said on Instagram that he has used meditation to cope with anxiety and depression since he was 17 years old, but needed to get professional help.

And his words have had an impact on men of colour who have also struggled with their mental health.

'It just makes it OK'

"I'm in awe that he's having that conversation," Ben Hurst, who works promoting gender equality in young men and boys, tells Newsbeat.

"It just makes it OK. I started therapy recently and I remember when I started, I didn't tell my family, there was a big reluctance inside of me to tell my friends and to have that conversation."



Black men are portrayed as violent in the media which can increase pressure to stay silent, says Ben

Ben says he was encouraged not to talk about his feelings when he was younger and that he would be told to "fix his face" when he was upset.

"Particularly in POC (people of colour) communities, there's a big push back on talking about emotion, especially for men," he adds.

"It's almost like when you're young, you're taught to not air business out in public, to not talk about stuff outside of the house."

Other's have praised how openly Big Sean spoke about his mental health, rather than "skirted around the issue."

'A step in the right direction for us'

"Sometimes we see statements where artists, musicians or activists talk about 'difficult periods' but they rarely give the name and say they were suffering from anxiety or depression - or, more importantly, say they saw a therapist," says charity worker Alex Leon.

He says that often in his community, BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) men feel they have to "uphold the family name", which can make people even more reluctant to speak up.



"Young men of color don't have many role models when it comes to mental health"

"What Big Sean has done is a good step in the right direction for us to be able to tell men of colour in the media that they should be speaking more openly because we need that representation," he says.

'It all started with me'

Sean says therapy helped him get "clarity" on his situation and was able to focus on relationships which had meaning in his life.

"I had a lot of toxic relationships around me," he says.

"Even the relationship with my mum was getting to a point where we weren't talking like that.

"It was just weird because it had never been like that with me and her."



Sean says that his mental health issues meant that he lost interest in making music, saying it began to feel "like a job".

"I realised that it all started with me," he says.

"I couldn't point the finger at anyone else, I had to point it at myself, nurture those relationships that were important to me but most importantly nurture the relationship with myself."

Sean says that spending time by himself, doing activities he enjoyed alone, helped. He even went skydiving to try and improve his mental health.

"In the midst of that I definitely rediscovered myself and found a whole new energy and me being the source of it - not somebody else," he says.

"Put the energy back into yourself, be clear about what you want to do and just know that it all translates to happiness."



Sean released his fourth album, I Decided, in February 2017 but in his Instagram post he suggests that his improved mental health may mean new music is on its way.

"I started getting back to making music and it started being fun again and I'm making the best music of my life," he says.

"It feels good to be back at a higher level."

If you've been affected by any of the issues discussed in this article, you can find help at the BBC Advice pages.

 

Last week I went to the doctor for my routine annual exams and physical. For all accounts, I’m a healthy, strapping, middle aged man. Standing over six feet tall and weighing roughly 195 lbs, I’m living my best life and should continue to do so for many more years.

In addition to checking the health of my liver, kidneys, cholesterol and other levels in my blood work, the doctor asked if I wanted to include an HIV test.

“Sure, Doc, go ahead,” I replied.

It had been a couple years since my last HIV test but, although I’m a Black Gay man living in Atlanta, I’m what medical professionals call a “low risk candidate.” I don’t do hookups and I’m mad selective on who I make ‘the beast with two backs’ with. And even then, we use protection. Not a guarantee, but condoms definitely reduce the chances of infection when compared to “breeding it raw.”

My blood work came back as expected…until I scrolled down to the HIV results:


So…”Reactive” means negative, right?

I jumped on the Internets and opened up dozens of tabs searching for what the fuck Labcorp was really trying to tell me. Every link, article and message board said what I feared, “Reactive” means that HIV antibodies were detected in the blood. Which means, the subject had been exposed to HIV and started building up antibodies to (unsuccessfully) fight the virus infection.

I looked at that LabCorp shit again like:



I immediately dug into my old text threads and sent a “sup” message to the last dude I had sex with. After some pleasantries and catching up, he informed me that he is now “poz” and on meds.



But, he assured me, he had become positive long after we were together.



And while he had me on the line, he wanted to know would I be open to dating someone who was positive?

“First off, yes I would…But I’mma seriously need to get back to you, bro.”

I went back to the Internets and typed: “Can HIV be immaculately conceived like baby Jesus?”

Surprisingly, no results. But I did read on the CDC website that false positive results are EXTREMELY rare and that the current testing is 99.6 percent accurate.

Then my phone rang. It was my doctor’s office requesting to see me first thing in the morning. Oh damn, they want to tell me the news in person.

This is when I really freaked out. I called my ma dukes and texted @OckyDub, basically accepting my fate: I had become an Atlanta Black gay HIV Statistic without even getting the benefit of the inhibition-lowered regret sex.



The next morning, my doctor sat me down in the small patient room and said, “Do you know why I called you back here?”

I lifted my head high, puffed out my chest and just stared at him:



“You tested HIV positive,” he said, looking down at his charts. “The lab found HIV antibodies in your blood sample. But when they tested for HIV antigens, that’s the HIV virus itself, they didn’t find anything. It came up negative. So they retested for the antibodies again, and those results came up negative as well.”

Wait, what?

“I think it was a false positive the first time. And as you saw further down on your lab results, their final interpretation was that you were HIV negative as well.”

Wait. Further down on the lab results? Oh, you mean all this medical technobabble that I totally missed?



My doctor took more blood to do the same tests again, as well as completely separate tests to further confirm my status. These were the results:


So for anyone that lost track:

NICK DELMACY IS HIV NEGATIVE!

That was probably the headline I should have made for this post, but baits need to be clicked.

Apparently the chances are getting a false positive result (while it does happen to some) is very rare:



So what have I learned from all of this?

I learned that I should read more good. I might have saved myself a lot of aggravation had I really read through the results in full.

And I learned that I should seriously consider Truvada (aka PrEP) to further protect myself from scares like this in the future. Even for someone like myself who doesn’t have wild ‘black gay web series’ sex all the time, I am def a freaky dude when I do…and all it takes is one time.

As for the poz dude who asked if I would be open to dating him:



We lost touch for legitimate reasons that had nothing to do with his HIV status.

Read the whole post here.

 

If I could find a way to discuss the complexities of men’s ability to admit when they’ve been made victims of sexual assault without actually recounting my personal experience with it, I’d do it. I can’t.

I still have trouble referring to what happened to me as assault. In fact, I utilize Olympic-level mental gymnastics to avoid that terminology, usually saying that I was on the receiving end of “inappropriate behavior” or “was taken advantage of physically.” It took me a year-and-a-half to even admit to myself that I wasn’t OK with what happened, and another year for me to acknowledge the same thing to someone else.

I was 23 years old, still in college (not-so-fun fact: male college students ages 18 to 24 are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted than members of the same demographic who aren’t in college) and attending a massive event for the industry in which I was just starting to find my footing. At a large party the first night of the event, I was introduced to someone with whom I was familiar through social media. It was immediately evident she wasn’t sober.

After what I’d generously estimate to be 90 seconds of small talk, she leaned forward and stuck her tongue down my throat. I pulled back. She proceeded to do it again twice more. I made a clumsy exit from the interaction, but periodically throughout the night she’d find me again and make further drunken passes at me, both physical and verbal. For further context, she was several years older than me and had rising stock in our industry. I was still very much at the bottom of the proverbial totem pole.

When I went back to my hotel that night, something felt off. There was a little voice in the back of my head telling me that something about what had happened wasn’t normal, wasn’t appropriate. I stifled that voice. In fact, the next morning, to cover up my abstract shame and discomfort (and to get ahead of any potential embarrassment had somebody seen it) I did the only thing I knew how to do: I bragged about it. I did everything I could to turn it into a crazy party story. I even instigated further contact with her, going so far as to try and see her a few nights later. See? I was OK. I was an active participant in the story, not a victim. Everything was fine.

But in the months that followed, I began to have panic attacks whenever I saw her at industry events. It only worsened when, in the midst of an interaction with a mutual friend, she joked about what had happened. I realized I never wanted to be in the same room as her again. The problem is that we worked in the same industry, so we were in the same room together often. Rather than speak up or seek closure (whatever that even means in situations like these), I let my feelings fester, until I slowly felt less and less at home in the environment I had worked so hard to earn my place in.

Still, I didn’t recognize what happened as sexual assault. I wouldn’t let myself. Because there’s a huge difference between recognizing that men can be victims of sexual assault and recognizing that you, a man, have been made a victim of sexual assault.

I think one of the greatest fears men are conditioned to hold, even if they don’t realize it, is the loss of autonomy. You are the master of your decisions and of your body. You are, at all times, In Control. To admit that you’re a victim is to relinquish that fabrication of control. Admitting to yourself that you’ve already lost it can break you.

On top of that, there’s a stereotype in our society that men are, well, always down for sex. A guy can’t be the victim of an unwanted sexual advance because there’s no such thing as a guy who isn’t receptive to ANY sexual advance, at ANY time. Hell, men who do come forward with allegations of sexual assault are often told by someone (usually with an egg avatar on Twitter) that they’re lucky, that they should be thankful for the experience, that they have nothing to complain about.

So, for nearly two years, I pretended I was OK with what had happened. I never let myself say the words “harassment” or “assault” or “victim” out loud, and every time they’d pop into my head I’d remind myself that I couldn’t have been assaulted ― if I were assaulted, why would I have kept talking to her? After all, I didn’t not want to kiss her, I just didn’t want to do it at that time, and that place, when she were in that condition. Plus it wasn’t like I was, God forbid, forced into sex or anything. What did I have to complain about?

I thought this in total ignorance of facts I already knew to be true ― that victims often return to the people who assault them and try to make peace, and that mutual attraction doesn’t negate a lack of consent. But of course, recognizing these things would mean admitting that I was a victim.

It’s been some time now since the session with my therapist in which I finally realized that what happened wasn’t consensual, and admitted to myself that I had been sexually assaulted. While it’s still not something I share details of openly, the few friends and peers I’ve talked about it with have been supportive and receptive, wholly understanding the situation and never questioning my take on the experience. I’m lucky I was given the space to realize this, to admit that something had happened to me that contradicted my self-constructed identity as a “man.”

Ultimately, admitting you’ve been assaulted doesn’t signify a loss of autonomy or control ― quite the opposite. To take control of your experiences and admit that something bad happened is taking back control. It’s counteracting the negative stigma surrounding men openly discussing sexual assault. The toxicity of conditioned masculinity is a hell of a drug, though, and reaching a point where you’re comfortable taking back that control can be daunting.

I’m thankful for the dialogue started by the Me Too movement and specifically Terry Crews sharing his experience with assault over the last year. It’s created a space in which it feels safer for everyone, including men, to discuss the trauma that comes with being a victim of assault ― a great deal of which is often self-inflicted.

However, my situation isn’t unique. I know men who have managed to convince themselves that they weren’t assaulted, who have utilized the same mental gymnastics to remove the stigma of victimhood from their identity. It’s not a healthy way to think.

In our ongoing and expanding dialogue on the nature of sexual assault, I only hope that we continue to encourage men to feel safe in recognizing their experiences with it. Vulnerability isn’t weakness and victimhood need not be a badge of shame.

I’m A Man And It Took Me Years To Recognize I Had Been Sexually Assaulted | HuffPost

 

I was listening to the latest Cypheravenue Podcast, which was 2 months ago, and one of the Host's said they first became body conscious when they started getting into the Gay dating scene.
For me I guess it started when I was small. I was so skinny, tall and had broad 'Clothe Hanger' like shoulders.

My siblings always made fun of me and my sis would say, I had a Tapeworm that's why I never added weight. My aunts would join in making fun of the folds I had on the waist of my jeans, cos my belt almost went round my waist twice. One of my aunts will say 'Oh, even look how he doesn't have Nyash'( Nyash= Ass in Nigerian broken English). I would just smile and try to hide behind my elder brother. I never payed it any mind after this though.
In high School, the guys were very big and I was still tall but more lanky. I would drink whole milk to try to add weight. I would mix whole milk and Malt, cos I heard it makes you add weight, and drink it 2-3 times a day. No change!

When I started to get into my sexuality, I thought it would never be an issue. Boy, was I stupid! I remember going to a Circuit Festival with a friend and we got Zero play, even when we walked up to guys. My friend after many failed attempts said 'lets go, this is not the place for ppl like us'. I can clearly remember his face when he said it. Few months after I met up with said friend, when I tell you homeboy was JACKED! I could not believe it. He had gotten a personal trainer and started using steroids, he went on to say its the lifestyle. Gay men are very superficial and he is going to play the game with them. Mind you homeboy was is accomplished, like top 3 in his professional field, but that does not matter in 'the lifestyle'.
I was still skinny and I had many events where I would want to hookup with a guy and he will go 'you are really skinny'. I would laugh it off but then make up an excuse that I had to leave.
Fast-forward now, I am as one guy put it when we were about to hookup 'Ahh, you are very fleshy'. Translation 'You is Fat' lmao.I did not make up an excuse like before and leave, but I told him I was only going to give him head with my clothes on. YAY,PROGRESS! LoL
A few months back I had just finished at the gym, was changing, and as I took off my shirt this gay dude says 'Phew, you are fat too, thank God I am not the only one' dunno if that was some kind of bonding moment for him, cos the gym was filled that day with lots of muscular gay guys. I just smirked, while turning my back to him.
Don't get me wrong, I have become more comfortable with my body.
I go to the gym now, trying to eat healthy, use the stairs as much as I can, walk to the farmers market instead of driving, drink lots of water no sodas, cut off all sugar mostly use honey now, eat lost of vegetables and fruits, limit myself to a cake or two a month, no fast food.
I do not think I will ever be completely comfortable in my body? No. Looks and body play a huge roll in the dating world and as I am actively dating, I am reminded of that very often.
I do think I would come to that point of acceptance, where I am like 'Fuck it, this is me', but until then...

 

This Is Why Boys Need More Emotional Support Than Girls



When you read about gender stereotyping children, it's usually about behaviours like girls opting to play with dolls and boys preferring trucks. But what about other differences?

Recent and past research sheds light on gender differences in the brain and its development, and it's these studies we should be looking to when it comes to thinking about the kinds of emotional support we give our children, especially our boys.

In a 2000 study entitled "The Fragile Male," Sebastian Kraemer states that baby boy brains are actually more fragile than baby girls'. Even in the womb, boy brains are more reactive to maternal depression and stress, while at birth, baby boy brains lag behind girls by a full six weeks.

Research has also shown that boys have higher cortisol levels (the stress hormone) after a traumatic birth where they were separated from their mothers, or their caregiver was unresponsive.

Kraemer argues that female brains have an early advantage that stays with them throughout childhood, while boys struggle and trail behind in a variety of areas.

As boys age, they can continue to struggle, which, when compounded by the lack of emotional support, only gets more serious. Although scientists go back and forth on this, it is thought that males are more prone to dyslexia and difficulty with reading and language, making school and learning difficult. Boys are also more likely to have childhood onset conduct disorder and are two to three times as likely to have ADHD than girls.

In adulthood, Canadian men are three times as likely to die by suicide than women, and while men are just as prone to getting depression as women, they display it differently so it can be tougher to spot the signs.

However, while it's clear there may be gender differences in brain structures and development, the brain is also strongly shaped by experience. We call this amazing phenomenon neuroplasticity.

Kraemer's research shows that parents nurture their baby boys less than their girls. Why? Well, partially it's because boys are more demanding, which can cause more distance between parent and child and cause problems for the child down the road.

"Boys tended to be too excitable, and mothers did all they could to soothe and settle them, at some cost to their development," notes Kraemer. "The care of boys is generally more difficult and therefore more likely to go wrong, adding to the deficits already existing before birth. Since most of the growth of the human brain takes place after birth, some early environmental stressors could lead to disadvantage for boys being 'wired in.' In any case, in boys the formation of secure attachment to a caregiver is more subject than in girls to parental unavailability, insensitivity, or depression."

In adulthood, Canadian men are three times as likely to die by suicide than women, and while men are just as prone to getting depression as women, they display it differently so it can be tougher to spot the signs.
In addition, we have a harmful cultural stereotype which views boys as being the tougher and stronger sex. Parents simply provide less emotional nurturing for boys than girls because they assume they don't need it.

It's these toxic masculine stereotypes that are reinforced in young boys that can harm them as adults. "Young boys are taught early that expressing their emotions is taboo. This causes long-term harm to their relationships with each other and with people of other genders," Jessica Raven, executive director of Collective Action for Safe Spaces, previously told HuffPost Canada.

So, our boys are getting a double whammy: they have the more vulnerable brain, andthey get less supportive parenting. It's these differences in emotional support in the first year that Kraemer claimed are linked to men's greater mental health challenges later in life.

Researchers found that men who subscribed to societal gender norms, which are prescribed at birth, saw their mental health decrease and their tendency to find help drop, reports the CBC.

Dr. Allan Schore of UCLA supports Kraemer's claims. In his 2017 paper entitled "All Our Sons: The Developmental Neurobiology And Neuroendocrinology Of Boys At Risk,"Schore states, "In light of the male infant's slower brain maturation, the secure mother's attachment-regulating function as a sensitively responsive, interactive affect regulator of his immature right brain in the first year is essential to optimal male socioemotional development."

So what exactly does all that psychobabble mean to parents like you and me who are busy raising a boy? The concept Schore is trying to explain is that humans are shaped by the relationships they have, and that parents help develop the emotional capacities of their children by the relationship they have with them.

Loving, trusting, responsive, and intimate relationships help children understand, express, and detangle their emotional experiences. This aids in the development of social skills for understanding, caring, and getting along with others. It just so happens that boys need more help with this process than girls do, and most especially in the very first year of life.

Schore suggests we lobby for longer maternity, paternity, and family leave, so infants can be with their primary attachment figures longer. We need to cuddle and coo, smile and vocalize, and play peak-a-boo with our infant boys!

Here are some suggestions to ensure your boy is getting the emotional support he needs:

• Rather than thinking boys don't show their emotions (which is not true), see boys as struggling to show their emotions, and help them open up by encouraging them, letting them know it's OK to show their emotions, and listening.
• Encourage them to pay attention to their feelings and create a home where it feels safe to express all our feelings.
• Never shame them for their feelings. Don't say things like "Big boys don't cry," "Stop being dramatic," "Don't be a girl," or "Act like a big boy."
• Teach emotional regulation in the moment. Try your best to stay calm — when we aren't calm, we can't transmit any calming influence. Don't take their behaviours as directed at you personally. Remember that simple excitement can be mistaken as anxiety and trigger a fight, flight, freeze response.
• Recognize that boys need more, not less, care than girls.

Once again, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That first year of life is critical in the right brain emotional development that our boys need so much in order for them to grow into happy, healthy men. Cuddle and attune with your baby boys as much as you can!

 

I'm in full support of this campaign

 

Did any of you get a chance to check out part 1? Very interesting show with some very interesting questions. Check out this clips.

 

Scientists have engineered an antibody that attacks 99% of HIV strains and can prevent infection in primates.

It is built to attack three critical parts of the virus - making it harder for HIV to resist its effects.

The work is a collaboration between the US National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi.

The International Aids Society said it was an "exciting breakthrough". Human trials will start in 2018 to see if it can prevent or treat infection.

Our bodies struggle to fight HIV because of the virus' incredible ability to mutate and change its appearance.

These varieties of HIV - or strains - in a single patient are comparable to those of influenza during a worldwide flu season.

So the immune system finds itself in a fight against an insurmountable number of strains of HIV.

Super-antibodies
But after years of infection, a small number of patients develop powerful weapons called "broadly neutralising antibodies" that attack something fundamental to HIV and can kill large swathes of HIV strains.

Researchers have been trying to use broadly neutralising antibodies as a way to treat HIV, or prevent infection in the first place.
The study, published in the journal Science, combines three such antibodies into an even more powerful "tri-specific antibody".

Dr Gary Nabel, the chief scientific officer at Sanofi and one of the report authors, told the BBC News website: "They are more potent and have greater breadth than any single naturally occurring antibody that's been discovered."

The best naturally occurring antibodies will target 90% of HIV strains.

"We're getting 99% coverage, and getting coverage at very low concentrations of the antibody," said Dr Nabel.

Experiments on 24 monkeys showed none of those given the tri-specific antibody developed an infection when they were later injected with the virus.

Dr Nabel said: "It was quite an impressive degree of protection."

The work included scientists at Harvard Medical School, The Scripps Research Institute, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

'Exciting'
Clinical trials to test the antibody in people will start next year.

Prof Linda-Gail Bekker, the president of the International Aids Society, told the BBC: "This paper reports an exciting breakthrough.

"These super-engineered antibodies seem to go beyond the natural and could have more applications than we have imagined to date.

"It's early days yet, and as a scientist I look forward to seeing the first trials get off the ground in 2018.

"As a doctor in Africa, I feel the urgency to confirm these findings in humans as soon as possible."

Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it was an intriguing approach.

He added: "Combinations of antibodies that each bind to a distinct site on HIV may best overcome the defences of the virus in the effort to achieve effective antibody-based treatment and prevention."
New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

 

The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness. - The Boston Globe

As men grow older, they tend to let their friendships lapse. But there’s still time to do something about it.

LET’S START WITH THE MOMENT I realized I was already a loser, which was just after I was more or less told that I was destined to become one.

I’d been summoned to an editor’s office at the Globe Magazine with the old “We have a story we think you’d be perfect for.” This is how editors talk when they’re about to con you into doing something you don’t want to do.

Here was the pitch: We want you to write about how middle-aged men have no friends.

Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are.

The editor told me there was all sorts of evidence out there about how men, as they age, let their close friendships lapse, and that that fact can cause all sorts of problems and have a terrible impact on their health.

I told the editor I’d think about it. This is how reporters talk when they’re trying to get out of something they don’t want to do. As I walked back to my desk in the newsroom — a distance of maybe 100 yards — I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.

First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year?

And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I genuinely could not remember the last time I’d seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.

There were all those other good friends who feel as if they’re still in my lives because we keep tabs on one another via social media, but as I ran down the list of those I’d consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I’d seen many of them, even decades for a few.

By the time I got back to my desk, I realized that I was indeed perfect for this story, not because I was unusual in any way, but because my story is very, very typical. And as I looked into what that means, I realized that in the long term, I was heading down a path that was very, very dangerous.

Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States, has said many times in recent years that the most prevalent health issue in the country is not cancer or heart disease or obesity. It is isolation.

I TURNED 40 IN MAY. I have a wife and two young boys. I moved to the suburbs a few years ago, where I own a fairly ugly home with white vinyl siding and two aging station wagons with crushed Goldfish crackers serving as floor mats. When I step on a Lego in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom, I try to tell myself that it’s cute that I’ve turned into a sitcom dad.

During the week, much of my waking life revolves around work. Or getting ready for work. Or driving to work. Or driving home from work. Or texting my wife to tell her I’m going to be late getting home from work.

Much of everything else revolves around my kids. I spend a lot of time asking them where their shoes are, and they spend a lot of time asking me when they can have some “dada time.” It is the world’s cutest phrase, and it makes me feel guilty every time I hear it, because they are asking it in moments when they know I cannot give it to them — when I am distracted by an e-mail on my phone or I’m dealing with the constant, boring logistics of running a home.

We can usually squeeze in an hour of “dada time” before bed — mostly wrestling or reading books — and so the real “dada time” happens on weekends. That’s my promise. “I have to go to work, but this weekend,” I tell them, “we can have ‘dada time.’ ”

I love “dada time.” And I’m pretty good about squeezing in an hour of “me time” each day for exercise, which usually means getting up before dawn to go to the gym or for a run. But when everything adds up, there is no real “friend time” left. Yes, I have friends at work and at the gym, but those are accidents of proximity. I rarely see those people anywhere outside those environments, because when everything adds up, I have left almost no time for friends. I have structured myself into being a loser.

“YOU SHOULD USE THIS story suggestion as a call to do something about it.”

That’s Dr. Richard S. Schwartz, a Cambridge psychiatrist, and I had reached out to him because he and his wife, Dr. Jacqueline Olds, literally wrote the book on this topic, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century.

He agreed that my story was very typical. When people with children become overscheduled, they don’t shortchange their children, they shortchange their friendships. “And the public health dangers of that are incredibly clear,” he says.

Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.

The research doesn’t get any rosier from there. In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.

Now consider that in the United States, nearly a third of people older than 65 live alone; by age 85, that has jumped to about half. Add all of this up, and you can see why the surgeon general is declaring loneliness to be a public health epidemic.

“Since my wife and I have written about loneliness and social isolation, we see a fair number of people for whom this is a big problem,” Schwartz continues. But there’s a catch. “Often they don’t come saying they’re lonely. Most people have the experience you had in your editor’s office: Admitting you’re lonely feels very much like admitting you’re a loser. Psychiatry has worked hard to de-stigmatize things like depression, and to a large part it has been successful. People are comfortable saying they’re depressed. But they’re not comfortable saying they’re lonely, because you’re the kid sitting alone in the cafeteria.”

I’m not that kid. I’m gregarious. I have family around me all the time, or I’m around “friends” at work or elsewhere. I comment on their Facebook posts. They comment on mine. My wife and I also have other couples we like and see often. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that’s good enough — and for many men it is, at least until their spouse gets the friends in the divorce.

I’m hesitant to say I’m lonely, though I’m clearly a textbook case of the silent majority of middle-aged men who won’t admit they’re starved for friendship, even if all signs point to the contrary. Now that I’ve been forced to recognize it, the question is what to do about it. Like really do about it. Because the tricks I’ve been using clearly do not work. I’ve been on “guy dates” with people I like — maybe I met them through my kids or on an assignment or whatever — but all too often those are one and done. It’s not that we don’t hit it off. We’ll go have that beer, and we’ll spend that beer talking about how we’re overscheduled and never get to hang with our friends, vaguely making plans to do something again, though we both know it’s probably not going to happen — certainly not the grand “Let’s hike the Appalachian Trail” ideas that start getting thrown out after the third beer. It’s a polite way of kicking the ball down the road, but never into the goal. I like you. You like me. Is that enough? Does that make us friends?




IN FEBRUARY AT A CONFERENCE in Boston, a researcher from Britain’s University of Oxford presented study results that most guys understand intuitively: Men need an activity together to make and keep a bond. Women can maintain friendships over the phone. My wife is capable of having long phone talks with her sister in Virginia or her friend Casey (whom she sees in person almost every day), and I kind of look at it with amazement. I hate the phone. My guy friends seem to share my feelings, because our phone conversations seem to naturally last about five minutes before someone says, “All right, I’ll catch up with you later.” Dudes aren’t going to maintain a bromance that way, or even over a once-in-a-blue-moon beer. We need to go through something together. That’s why, studies have shown, men tend to make their deepest friends through periods of intense engagement, like school or military service or sports. That’s how many of us are comfortable.

When I was talking to Richard Schwartz, the psychiatrist told me something that had me staring off into the distance and nodding my head. Researchers have noticed a trend in photographs taken of people interacting. When female friends are talking to each other, they do it face to face. But guys stand side by side, looking out at the world together.

But in the middle years of life, those side-by-side opportunities to get together are exactly the sort of things that fall off. When you have a gap in your schedule, you feel bad running off with the fellas and leaving your partner alone to look for the shoes. And the guys I’d like to spend time with are all locked in the exact same bind as me. Planning anything takes great initiative, and if you have to take initiative every time you see someone, it’s easy to just let it disappear.

That’s why Schwartz and others say the best way for men to forge and maintain friendships is through built-in regularity — something that is always on the schedule. This worked well for me over the past year (however unintentionally) with a college buddy named Matt. We signed up to run last April’s Boston Marathon together, and even though he lives in Chicago, we were in regular contact about our training, his trip to Boston, etc., and our relationship became stronger than ever, even though our best and deepest conversation occurred during the four-plus hours it took us to get from Hopkinton to Boston, side by side. We repeated the process with the Chicago Marathon in October, this time in less than four hours (thank God for the flat Midwest), but we haven’t had much contact since then, because we’re no longer going through anything together. I texted him to congratulate him after the Cubs won the World Series. He did the same for me after the Patriots won the Super Bowl. But I can’t remember the last time I talked to Matt since. We have no further plans. That would take initiative.

WHENEVER THE POWERBALL or Mega Millions gets over $100 million, I’ll buy a ticket. My wife thinks I’m nuts, that I’m just wasting our money. I tell her she’s missing the point. I know I’m not going to win, but in that time between when I buy the ticket and the TV news trucks do not show up outside my home, my fantasy brain answers a question for me: What would I really do if I didn’t have to do all this other stuff?

For a while, this was an escape fantasy that involved loading my family into an old Volkswagen bus, hitting the road, and setting off to look for America. That ended when I actually managed to save up enough money to buy an old Volkswagen bus, an endeavor that did not lead to a tour of this country’s national parks but of its auto repair shops. The bus is gone. And so is the escape fantasy. I’m very happy in my life. If I need someone to confide in, I have my wife. All the pieces are here, except one — the guys. I’d like to think they’re also missing me and are just locked into this same prison of commitments. But I don’t want to wait until we’re all retired and can reconnect on a golf course. It feels silly to wait that long, and thanks to this stupid story, I know it’s quite dangerous. So I’m ready to steal a simple concept that doesn’t require lottery money.

A few years ago, shortly after I’d moved from the city to Cape Ann on the North Shore, I took a kayaking class run out of a shop in Essex. At some point, the man who owned the place, an older guy named Ozzy, said something in passing about how he couldn’t do something because he had “Wednesday night.” Slightly confused, I asked him what he was talking about, and he explained an idea to me that was so simple and profound that I resolved one day to steal it . . . when I got older. I think it’s time to admit I’m there.

“Wednesday night,” Ozzy explained, was a pact he and his buddies had made many years before, a standing order that on Wednesday nights, if they were in town, they would get together and do something, anything.

Everything about the idea seemed quaint and profound — the name that was a lack of a name (such a guy move); the placement in the middle of the week; the fact that they’d continued it for so long. But most of all, it was the acknowledgment from male friends that they needed their male friends, for no other reason than they just did.

I tried to reach Ozzy, but he takes the winters off to go skiing in California and the number I had was disconnected. When I tried to get an e-mail address from a mutual friend, I was told he didn’t do e-mail. This guy seems like he has some things figured out. So, Ozzy, I’m stealing Wednesday night.

Obviously, it’s not going to work every time, but experts say that even the act of trying to increase your friendships can benefit your health, so consider this the beginning of that. I’m OK with admitting I’m a little lonely. Doesn’t make me a loser. Doesn’t make you a loser.

Fellas, what are you doing this Wednesday? And the one after that? And the one after that? Consider it a standing invitation. Let’s do something together.

 

Zeke Thomas. Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

A year ago in February, Josh “Zeke” Thomas, the 28-year-old musician son of NBA legend Isiah Thomas, was raped, in his own apartment, by a man he met on Grindr. The experience came as close as any in his in many ways pretty charmed life to destroying him. “No one ever talks about this,” he says. “Especially men — gay men. It’s like, is it real, did it happen, is it believable?” He takes a deep breath.

I’ve known Thomas for a few years now through my boyfriend. They met at a party after Thomas took it upon himself to push aside a DJ who was doing a lame job; my boyfriend went up and thanked him for doing so. I’ve never not seen him in a state of wide-eyed, tongue-out (an oft-deployed Instagram face of his) charismatic bounce. But on this tentatively sunny late-spring New York day — just back from a weekend at Coachella where he’d DJed three gigs and still had his anti-desert-dust filtration bandanna hanging out of his pocket — he was, at least for him, subdued, as he tells me what happened to him and what happened a year ago when he was living in Chicago and making EDM music there.

“We had chatted on Grindr, and I had invited him to come by my studio since he was a singer,” he says. “Nothing against Grindr. I’ve met great people on Grindr, I’ve had sex with great people on Grindr. I can’t blame an app. But you don’t know shit about people you meet on it.” In any case, they’d not hooked up right away. “He seemed like a great guy. We hung out at the recording studio. And then a couple of days later he said, let’s go to Boys Town,” the gayborhood in Chicago, “for a drink.”

He felt safe there: He’d had DJ gigs there. He knew bartenders. But by the time he realized something was wrong it was too late. “All I remember is … getting in the cab. I know that I got drugged. I knew probably the moment that it happened because something didn’t taste right. But I didn’t think about it. I just didn’t think about it.” The next thing he knew it was the next morning. “It was literally like with Bill Cosby. When those women were like: ‘I woke up and he was fixing me breakfast or whatever.’” He pauses for a while, and then continues, quietly. “I woke up and he was handing me a glass of water and saying, ‘That was great let’s hang out again.’” He noticed that his dog was shut outside on his balcony, barking. And the guy leaves.

“My ass was destroyed. Destroyed. I’m bleeding,” Thomas recalls. “And I’m just like — terrified. I can’t move. I didn’t move from my apartment for two days. I didn’t move. I didn’t talk to anybody. I froze.” When he went to find the guy on Grindr, he either had blocked him or removed himself from the app.


Afterward, Thomas went a little bit crazy: not wanting to be alone, feeling manic. I asked Thomas if he told anyone, and when. He lowers his voice to a near-whisper. “I started getting into drugs and I started telling people when I was high. But they’re high too. They don’t want to talk about this shit.” Eventually, while high on mushrooms, he told his parents, who flew him back to New York (his dad is part owner and president of the WNBA team New York Liberty), and got him to a doctor and into therapy.

That led him to write about it in song: He has a single, called “Dealin’ With It,” out next month, which, obliquely anyway, deals with it:

“I’m not beggin for forgiveness

But this time I’ve come undone

Let my spirit leave this palace

I can’t find the strength to run.”

It’s not an easy thing to talk about directly. There is an attitude among gay men, or at least about gay men and in turn then internalized by gay men, that, as Thomas remembers straight friends saying, “‘Oh, you guys are always down. You’re always having sex anyway. You have Grindr; it’s so easy.’ And it’s like — really? All guys? And even guys who are promiscuous have a choice.”

Eventually, when he was not high, he began talking to his close friends about it. “Men and women. And they said: ‘This happened to me.’ Two of them said this happened to me multiple times.”

And gay men don’t talk about it — but they do often make jokes infused with a kind of casual self-hating gay bravado, about how you “can’t rape the willing.” The fact is, when I was younger, something very close to what happened to Thomas happened to me often enough that, when I think back on it, I realize that I’d come to think that it didn’t count as forced sex if I’d managed to get the guy to put a condom on. This was before the age of Truvada, and I have friends who tested positive after not managing to do that, often because they were in blackouts, sometimes suspiciously so. And terrifyingly, although he was on PrEP, Thomas tested positive himself afterward, though it turned out to be a false positive when he was retested.


Until this, Thomas — who was born in Detroit while his father, the Hall of Fame player, was with the Pistons — was pretty lucky from the start. “I was born on the only off day he had to see me during the 1988 NBA finals against the Lakers,” he says. His Instagram is one of those that gives off a casual feeling of a fortunate life, with happy friends and cameos ranging from Shaq to President Obama, not to mention his cute little dog Zeus.

His mother was a teacher, and he and his little sister were raised in the tony near-suburb of Bloomfield Hills and went to private school. Thomas is built like an athlete: One of the first things you notice about him is how long his arms and legs are. They seem to be everywhere at once; it’s part of what gives him his physical exuberance.


“My arms and legs were always too big for my body!” he says. “My cousins always used to say: ‘Josh, get it together.’ But I mean once my body caught up, I could do all those things.” He ran track and played basketball.

He says his father never pushed him to pursue athletics, though; he only asked that he “honor the family name. Respect the family name.” The family was originally from Mississippi and moved north to find a better life, and as the civil-rights movement progressed, their opportunities increased, but it was never easy. His father grew up poor in Chicago, the youngest of nine children — “they all got out, my dad in a big way,” Thomas says. In 1989, Disney made a TV movie about Isiah’s childhood called A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story.

His parents have had friends who were gay — in fact, he remembers asking his parents what the word “gay” meant after he first heard it from a cousin. “You know, they love each other,” his parents explained about a close-to-the-family same-sex couple at the time. “But they didn’t go into the birds and the bees.”

In the meantime, young Thomas was a Michael Jackson superfan (well, grown-up Thomas is too). “I used to perform full-on productions,” of Jackson’s music, he says, laughing raucously. “Set up chairs. Give tickets away.” And, when he was in sixth grade, Queer As Folk was on TV, and he’d stay up late watching it.

When he was 12, an older cousin got a DJ mixer, and Thomas became obsessed with it, begging his father to buy him one too. But that same summer, something else happened: a “dick-showing” contest in the back of the van on the way back from a tournament turned into an assault. “All of a sudden my head was being jammed down,” he recalls, on the other boys’ penises. “I don’t want to criminalize or demonize the perpetrators … But it wasn’t something I wanted in the moment.”

Shortly afterward his father got a job as the coach of the Indiana Pacers and the family moved. “I got away,” he says now.

But in other ways Indiana was hardly an escape. “I remember my dad had to have a police escort to games because he had death threats for his being a black coach.”

Then his dad was hired by the Knicks in 2004, and they moved to New York. He was in high school, and he suddenly felt like a Kardashian. “I didn’t realize how big a star my dad was until we moved to New York.” Tabloid journalists followed him, and everyone had an opinion about how his dad was doing. (As it turned out, he didn’t oversee a particularly successful run, adding to the pressure.) And young Thomas became a bit of a club kid.

He returned to Indiana for college, though. Bloomington lacked clubs, but had Klansmen. In 2008, when Obama was elected, he remembers the Ku Klux Klan marching by his apartment in Bloomington in protest.


“You are dealing with two roads of hate in a sense: You’re dealing with the fact that you’re black and that you’re gay,” he says. “Your parents teach you how to talk to the police, this is what to say, these are the numbers to call if something happens,” he says. But being gay is different. What do you do when someone calls you a “purse-carrying faggot” for carrying a too-fashionable bag on the subway?


I ask him why he likes being a DJ: It seems to be one place where he feels completely in control. “I compare it to being a puppeteer,” he says. Behind the turntables, he can survey the room: “It’s literally, dance, dance puppet. It’s so much fun.”

When he was 22, and living in Harlem and DJing in places like GoldBar and 1 Oak, he had a friend choke to death on his own vomit one night. That was the first time he made a song with a message: It’s called “Regret.”

The video for it is surprisingly slick, and it gives a sense of his life at that moment, handsome and young with other good-looking, well-polished, well-connected friends. They filmed it at the Thompson Hotel; Amanda Lepore and Taryn Manning appear, along with “a bunch of Mob Wives,” he remembers. (As in, from the reality-TV show.) And while the message is to party responsibly, its good intentions are undermined somewhat by the fact that its debauchery is so glamorously presented.

In 2015, he released a song called “Blackness,” with Chuck D and Pittsburgh poet and “RAPtivist” Jasiri X, both of whom he’d met through Sankofa, the networking organization started by Harry Belafonte. The video for it mixes iconic images from the civil-rights movement with, among other things, images of Thomas onstage in whiteface, intended as a kind of protest for the minstrelsy mainstream culture often requires of black artists in order for them to succeed. The tone is at times a bit unfocused but still powerful; Paper magazine called ita “civil-rights anthem for the EDM generation.”

Thomas was once told by a manager that he wouldn’t make it as a DJ if he didn’t “tone down the gay.” But he isn’t interested in toning anything down, and his new song is part of that. Last year, he’d been planning on going to London to record, but his manager thought all the songs he made were just somehow off, distanced. He advised him: “’Write about you,’” Thomas recalls. “Which isn’t the same as writing about sexual assault.”

He arrived in London almost a year to the day after the assault (on that day itself he had to excuse himself from a photo shoot to go outside and scream for a while). Then he wrote “Dealin’ With It.”

And he sings on it — a first for him. “Way more exposing,” he admits.

“Cut the strings and cut me loose

I got some things I need to do.

I’m dealing with it.”

To help others do the same, he’s become the first male ambassador for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. But mostly he’s just happy that he is, in fact, honoring his family name.

“You look at my dad and Magic [Johnson, whose son EJ is also gay]. You have strong black men, whose sons are gay and are also strong black men, who are living their truth and expressing their truth,” he says. “I want every young black, brown, white gay kid to know that we’re going to breathe. We’re going to keep going. We’re going to keep marching.”

 

This global occasion recognized every November addresses issues which heavily impact men. The 2016 theme is "Stop Male Suicide."

 

Hot off the press: Just for YOU.

 

For the first time ever, federal officials estimated how likely blacks and Hispanics are likely to be diagnosed with the virus that causes AIDS.
Half of gay and bisexual black men and a quarter of gay and bisexual Hispanic men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes, the Centers for Disease Control announced in a first-of-its-kind study on Tuesday.

While the lifetime risk of a positive HIV diagnosis has fallen from 1 in 78 Americans overall in 2005 to 1 in 99 today, the decline has not been distributed equally among the U.S. population. For the foreseeable future, the CDC estimates that gay, bisexual, black and Hispanic people will continue to bear the brunt of the HIV epidemic. The new study is the first time that the CDC has estimated lifetime HIV risk based on race.

Overall, the CDC projected that one in 64 men and one in 227 women in the United States will be diagnosed with HIV at current rates. For black and Hispanic people, however, that risk increases dramatically.

Regardless of sexual orientation, one in 20 black men and one in 48 black women will be diagnosed with the virus that causes AIDS in their lifetimes, according to the CDC. For Hispanic men and women, the risks are one in 48 and one in 227, respectively.

White people have the lowest chance of an HIV diagnosis, with an overall lifetime risk of less than one percent. Gay and bisexual white men still have a lifetime risk of one in 11, though.

The CDC’s projections are based on data about HIV diagnoses and death rates collected from 2009 to 2013, and they assume that rates of new diagnoses remain constant. If that’s the case, one in six men who have sex with other men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes.

“These estimates are a sobering reminder that gay and bisexual men face an unacceptably high risk for HIV—and of the urgent need for action,” said Dr. Eugene McCray, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “If we work to ensure that every American has access to the prevention tools we know work, we can avoid the outcomes projected in this study.”

For Hispanic people living in the United States, the CDC has already outlined an array of factors behind the alarming rate of new infections: a high prevalence of HIV, poverty and lack of health insurance coverage, “machismo” that can encourage men to engage in risky sexual behavior as a show of strength, and reluctance to access prevention services for fear of revealing one’s immigration status.

In South Florida, for example, an already high prevalence of HIV has combined with low awareness of the virus and social stigma to produce the highest rate of new infections in the U.S., driven largely by new infections among young Hispanic men.

For black people, CDC resources show, prevention challenges are similar: poverty, stigma, barriers to health care access, and too few people knowing their status. Risk in black communities is especially high, the CDC notes, because “African Americans tend to have sex with partners of the same race/ethnicity mean[ing] that [they] face a greater risk of HIV infection with each new sexual encounter.”

According to the CDC’s new projections, all of the states with the highest lifetime risk for HIV are in the South, with the exceptions of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. All of these states and the South tend to have large black and Hispanic populations, higher rates of poverty, and less health-insurance coverage.

The CDC estimates that HIV risk is highest in Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida, with about 2 percent of these states’ populations believed to test HIV positive eventually.

No single area may be worst-hit than Washington, D.C., which is nearly 50 percent black and 10 percent Latino. According to the CDC’s projections, a staggering one in 13 D.C. residents will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes.

But the CDC doesn’t want its projections to be interpreted as a death sentence.

“As alarming as these lifetime risk estimates are, they are not a foregone conclusion. They are a call to action,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention.

If the U.S. can reduce new infections, those lifetime risk numbers will go down, too. The CDC’s current prevention approach emphasizes HIV testing, condom use, treatment for those who have already been diagnosed, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a daily medication that has been shown to reduce risk by more than 90 percent when used correctly.

“The prevention and care strategies we have at our disposal today provide a promising outlook for future reductions of HIV infections and disparities in the U.S.,” said Dr. Mermin, “but hundreds of thousands of people will be diagnosed in their lifetime if we don’t scale up efforts now.”

 

No substantial evidence links marijuana to traffic accidents, domestic violence or cancer, yet pot is illegal and listed as a Schedule I controlled substance by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Meanwhile, alcohol remains legal despite the fact that it has been proven to contribute to many societal ills, including domestic violence and auto accidents.

In 2011 alone, an individual in the U.S. was arrested for marijuana use, sale or possession every 42 seconds, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Those numbers have been climbing.

Some of the obvious hypocrisy inherent to marijuana prohibition is highlighted in a commercial (see below) that ran a brief stint before NASCAR audiences last month, until it was removed to preserve the “family atmosphere” of the event, according to race organizers. The ad space for the commercial was purchased by the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), the largest marijuana legalization advocacy group in the states, and the creators of the commercial.

The Huffington Post reported that MPP celebrated the commercial as:

“… the first time a pro-pot campaign would be seen at a major sporting event. Organizers for the Brickyard 400 race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway disputed that claim, noting that the boards set to display the commercial were not technically on stadium grounds. When officials with the company that had allowed MPP to purchase air time caught wind of its pro-marijuana message, they scrambled to take it down.”

In 31 seconds, the ad points to a series of clearcut ways pot is statistically less harmful than alcohol. The commercial has received more than 944,500 YouTube hits and made the rounds on Facebook.

It begins with the line: “If you’re an adult who enjoys a good beer, there’s a similar product you might want to know about—one without all the calories or serious health problems, less toxic so it doesn’t cause hangovers or overdose deaths, and it’s not linked to violence or reckless behavior.”

That product, of course, is marijuana. MPP created the commercial in an effort to clarify some of the myths and misconceptions that taint marijuana’s reputation—misconceptions MPP says are perpetuated by the U.S. government.

On its site, MPP states,

“If you’re like most Americans, you have been led to believe that marijuana is a dangerous and addictive drug that has destroyed the lives of millions of teens and adults. You have been encouraged to believe that marijuana causes lung cancer and is a ‘gateway’ to harder drugs. The government has even tried to convince you that most people who use marijuana are losers who sit around on couches all day doing nothing.”

MPP says its goal is to “wipe the slate clean” and replace fiction with facts about marijuana use. “We simply hope you will come to understand that it is far, far less harmful than what your government has told you,” the text states. The MPP website goes on to describes the common recreational uses of marijuana, which are similar to alcohol consumption patterns:

“None of this is ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral.’ It is simply something that these responsible adults choose to do. And frequently, it is something they choose to do specifically instead of alcohol. And for good reason! Alcohol is more toxic, more addictive, more harmful to the body, more likely to result in injuries, and more likely to lead to interpersonal violence than marijuana.”

The page also includes the following bulleted list comparing alcohol to marijuana:

1. Many people die from alcohol use. Nobody dies from marijuana use. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than 37,000 annual U.S. deaths are attributed to alcohol use alone (this figure does not include accidental deaths). On the other hand, the CDC does not even have a category for deaths caused by the use of marijuana.

2. People die from alcohol overdoses. There has never been a fatal marijuana overdose. The official publication of the Scientific Research Society, American Scientist, reported that alcohol is one of the most toxic drugs and using just 10 times what one would use to get the desired effect could lead to death. Marijuana is one of – if not the – least toxic drugs, requiring thousands of times the dose one would use to get the desired effect to lead to death. This “thousands of times” is actually theoretical, since there has never been a case of an individual dying from a marijuana overdose. Meanwhile, according to the CDC, hundreds of alcohol overdose deaths occur in the United States each year.


3. The health-related costs associated with alcohol use far exceed those for marijuana use. Health-related costs for alcohol consumers are eight times greater than those for marijuana consumers, according to an assessment recently published in the British Columbia Mental Health and Addictions Journal. More specifically, the annual health-related cost of alcohol consumption is $165 per user, compared to just $20 per user for marijuana. This should not come as a surprise given the vast amount of research that shows alcohol poses far more – and more significant – health problems than marijuana.

4. Alcohol use damages the brain. Marijuana use does not. Despite the myths we’ve heard throughout our lives about marijuana killing brain cells, it turns out that a growing number of studies seem to indicate that marijuana actually has neuroprotective properties. This means that it works to protect brain cells from harm. For example, one recent study found that teens who used marijuana as well as alcohol suffered significantly less damage to the white matter in their brains. Of course, what is beyond question is that alcohol damages brain cells.

5. Alcohol use is linked to cancer. Marijuana use is not. Alcohol use is associated with a wide variety of cancers, including cancers of the esophagus, stomach, colon, lungs, pancreas, liver, and prostate. Marijuana use has not been conclusively associated with any form of cancer. In fact, one study recently contradicted the long-time government claim that marijuana use is associated with head and neck cancers. It found that marijuana use actually reduced the likelihood of head and neck cancers. If you are concerned about marijuana being associated with lung cancer, you may be interested in the results of the largest case-controlled study ever conducted to investigate the respiratory effects of marijuana smoking and cigarette smoking. Released in 2006, the study, conducted by Dr. Donald Tashkin at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that marijuana smoking was not associated with an increased risk of developing lung cancer. Surprisingly, the researchers found that people who smoked marijuana actually had lower incidences of cancer compared to non-users of the drug.

6. Alcohol is more addictive than marijuana. Addiction researchers have consistently reported that marijuana is far less addictive than alcohol based on a number of factors. In particular, alcohol use can result in significant and potentially fatal physical withdrawal, whereas marijuana has not been found to produce any symptoms of physical withdrawal. Those who use alcohol are also much more likely to develop dependence and build tolerance.

7. Alcohol use increases the risk of injury to the consumer. Marijuana use does not. Many people who have consumed alcohol, or know others who have consumed alcohol, would not be surprised to hear that it greatly increases the risk of serious injury. Research published in 2011 in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research found that 36% of hospitalized assaults and 21% of all injuries are attributable to alcohol use by the injured person. Meanwhile, the American Journal of Emergency Medicine reported that lifetime use of marijuana is rarely associated with emergency room visits. According to the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, this is because: “Cannabis differs from alcohol … in one major respect. It does not seem to increase risk-taking behavior. This means that cannabis rarely contributes to violence either to others or to oneself, whereas alcohol use is a major factor in deliberate self-harm, domestic accidents and violence.” Interestingly enough, some research has even shown that marijuana use has been associated with a decreased risk of injury.