In a letter in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, three scientists from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia cite several dozen studies requiring a participant to be “in a reciprocal relationship with a person of the opposite sex.”

There are legitimate scientific reasons for excluding gays from certain studies. Scientists would want only heterosexuals if they were studying how HIV spreads during male-female sex, for example.

But the Fox Chase folks found cases where the reason for excluding gays is not clear: tests of a drug for attention-deficit disorder, a treatment for erection problems after prostate cancer surgery, and studies on sexual function related to diabetes, depression and benign enlargement of the prostate as men age.

Brian Egleston, a biostatistician at Fox Chase, made the observation while overseeing enrollment of patients into clinical trials at the cancer center.

“When I first saw this, I thought it was a fluke. The second time, I thought I’d dig deeper,” he said.

Egleston and Roland Dunbrack Jr., a biologist, and Dr. Michael J. Hall, a medical oncologist, did a spot check of a government database of thousands of studies and turned up more examples, most of them private-industry trials.

Researchers seeking federal money for their work must explain why a study excludes a group based on gender, race or ethnicity, but no explanation is needed for exclusion based on sexual orientation, Egleston said.

Exclusion can become self-perpetuating: Researchers designing a study often “cut and paste” participation criteria from earlier trials on a similar subject.

“It becomes the way it’s done,” and any bias gets repeated, Egleston said.

Estimates of how much of the U.S. population is gay or bisexual vary widely; some polls have put it around 4 percent.

(Jackson, Miss.) The Mississippi Department of Corrections  agreed to end the segregation of prisoners with HIV, a longstanding discriminatory policy that has prevented prisoners from accessing key resources that facilitate their successful transition back into the community.

The decision by Mississippi’s corrections commissioner Christopher Epps, prompted by recent advocacy by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, leaves Alabama and South Carolina as the only states in the nation that segregate prisoners based on their HIV status. Epps made the decision ahead of a forthcoming report by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch analyzing the harmful impact segregation policies have had in the three states.

“Commissioner Epps deserves a tremendous amount of credit for making this courageous decision to replace a policy based on irrational HIV prejudice with a policy based on science, sound correctional practice and respect for human rights,” said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “The remaining segregation policies in South Carolina and Alabama are a remnant of the early days of the HIV epidemic and continue to stigmatize prisoners and inflict them and their families with a tremendous amount of needless suffering.”

Public and correctional health experts agree that there is no medical basis for segregating HIV-positive prisoners within correctional facilities or for limiting access to jobs, vocational training and educational programs available to others.

Since 1987, however, the Mississippi corrections system has performed mandatory HIV tests on all prisoners entering the state prison system, and has permanently housed all male prisoners who test positive in a segregated unit at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the state’s highest security prison.

As a result, prisoners with HIV have been faced with unjustified isolation, exclusion and marginalization, and low-custody prisoners have been forced unnecessarily to serve their sentences in more violent, more expensive prisons.

The change in policy will enable prisoners with HIV to participate in jobs, training programs and other services to which they were previously denied access because of their HIV status and which are designed to prepare prisoners for a productive return to society.

Prisoners with HIV will now be able to participate in kitchen work, for example, which can be beneficial to them in many ways. Many prisoners worked in kitchens, cafes or restaurants prior to their incarceration, and continued employment in that area can help them upon re-entry into the workforce. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, there is no medical basis for preventing persons with HIV from working in kitchens or other food service employment.

Additionally, prisoners with HIV will no longer be assigned to a segregated HIV unit, which resulted in the public disclosure of their HIV status and left them at risk of being ostracized and subjected to hostility and violence at the hands of other prisoners.

Epps said he will phase in the new desegregation policy gradually for prisoners currently housed in the HIV unit, and will form a committee to make individualized placement decisions for these prisoners. Starting immediately, incoming prisoners will be housed using only criteria set out in the state classification plan such as criminal history, length of sentence and other factors unrelated to their HIV status.

“Prisoners with HIV were often forced to live in cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions, and we’re delighted that Mississippi has changed its policy,” said Megan McLemore, health researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Integrating prisoners with HIV is the norm across the United States and MDOC deserves significant credit for making this decision.”

Additional information about the ACLU National Prison Project is available online at: www.aclu.org/prison

“The Iowa Legislature outlawed smoking in an effort to improve health and reduce the medical costs that are often passed on to the state,” Chuck Hurley said, according to the Des Moines Register. “The secondhand impacts of certain homosexual acts are arguably more destructive, and potentially more costly to society than smoking. … Homosexual activity is certainly more dangerous for the individuals who engage in it than is smoking.”

Hurley cited a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that showed a higher number of gay and bisexual men have HIV and syphilis. The report made no mention of smoking.

Hurley believes Iowa’s passage of same-sex marriage will lead to higher HIV and syphilis rates in the state.

Gov. Chris Gregoire vowed to sign the bill when it hits her desk.

The bill will create anti-harassment policies in schools across the state. Each school will create a staff position that handles all harassment and bullying complaints. In addition, the bill states the school’s policies on harassment and bullying must be available online.

“Today let us celebrate the leadership of Representative Marko Liias who championed this legislation, the commitment of the legislature to ensuring that every student enjoys a safe learning environment and the ongoing work of the Safe Schools Coalition,” Josh Friedes, advocacy director of Equal Rights Washington said in a statement.

“Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who joined 16 other Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in writing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.

The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said.

The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, “healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it.”

Brian Moulton, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign,the nation’s largest gay rights group, said they are hopeful that the policy, last reviewed in 2006, will change under President Barack Obama, “who is interested in looking at all the policies that have a discriminatory effect.” The goal, he said, is “to have policies in place that are based on the science” rather than “any discriminatory idea about our community.”

The senators’ letter noted that in March 2006, the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers and the American Association of Blood Banks reported to an FDA-sponsored workshop that the ban “is medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

The FDA, in a statement, said that “while FDA appreciates concerns about perceived discrimination, our decision to maintain the deferral policy is based on current science and data and does not give weight to a donor’s sexual orientation.”

It said that while some groups favor relaxing restrictions, others, “such as those representing the hemophilia community, support continuation of the current policy.”

People with hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, require periodic transfusions and in the past, before screening techniques were improved to ensure blood was HIV-free, were among those most at risk of contracting the virus.

Kerry compared the effort to lift the blood donation ban to legislation he backed in 2008 to end the law banning people with HIV from traveling and immigrating to the United States. That ban was lifted last year.

Also signing the letter were Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Dick Durbin and Roland Burris of Illinois, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Al Franken of Minnesota, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Carl Levin of Michigan, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Mark Begich of Alaska.

In a study of 444 junior high, high school and college age students between the ages of 11 and 22, the researchers found 54 percent reported an incident of cyberbullying within the past month. Cyberbullying, in the study, included “electronic distribution of humiliating photos, dissemination of false or private information, or targeting victims in cruel online polls,” according to an ISU statement.

The bullying resulted in a range of negative emotions, researchers said. More than 1 in 4 in the study reported suicidal thoughts, 28 percent felt anxious about school and nearly half (45 percent) expereince depression.

“There’s a saying that we’ve now changed to read, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can kill,’ “ said Warren Blumenfeld, the study’s lead author, in the statement. “And especially at this age – pre-adolescence through adolescence – this is a time when peer influences are paramount in a young person’s life. If one is ostracized and attacked, that can have devastating consequences – not only physically, but on their emotional health for the rest of their lives.”

The United Nations and former President Bill Clinton launched the donation effort Thursday called MassiveGood. It aims to supply low-cost drugs for the developing world, helping medical workers and health officials fight HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and improve maternal and children’s health.

Major ticket distributors Amadeus, Travelport and Sabre Holdings Corp. and corporate buyers such as American Express Business Travel and Carlson Wagonlit Travel will offer the donation option to the companies that buy travel through them. The software to process the donations was developed by Amadeus.

Travelers will see the donation option when it’s offered by ticket sellers like Travelocity and some travel agents.

The option will show up like any other choice in buying a ticket, along with adding a car rental or hotel. Tickets sold directly through airline Web sites aren’t part of the program.

“I think this will catch on all over the world. And this is basically an institutionalized version of what we saw happen after the Haiti earthquake, where people were texting in $10, or $5 in Canada, in the automatic systems,” Clinton said. “These systems, I predict, will empower ordinary people to change the future of the world in ways that we can only begin to imagine.”

The money goes to the Geneva-based Millennium Foundation, founded in 2008 to find innovative ways to finance U.N. health goals, and the U.N.-funded UNITAID, an international facility for purchasing drugs hosted by the World Health Organization, also in Geneva.

Some of the money also will go to the Clinton Health Access Initiative and others who provide treatments in poor countries.

Giving what the group calls a “micro-contribution” is optional for everyone involved. The idea for it was raised by Dr. Philippe Douste-Blazy, a cardiologist and former French foreign minister.

Douste-Blazy, who chairs the Millenium Foundation and UNITAID, and is the special financing adviser for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said it builds on the 2006 “microtax” on airplane tickets that 16 nations adopted to help raise more than $1 billion.

“Hundreds of thousands of women, children and men will be able to access the most precious of human rights, the right to health care,” Douste-Blazy said, calling the donation effort a “great citizen movement around the world.”

Ban called it a simple idea that would be expanded to European nations, then elsewhere. “We hope MassiveGood will be become a truly global phenomenon,” he said.

The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, found that the percentage of children who reported being physically bullied over the past year had declined from nearly 22 percent in 2003 to under 15 percent in 2008. The percentage reporting they’d been assaulted by other youths, including their siblings, dropped from 45 percent to 38.4 percent.

The lead author of the study, Professor David Finkelhor, said he was “very encouraged.”

“Bullying is the foundation on which a lot of subsequent aggressive behavior gets built,” said Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. “If it’s going down, we will reap benefits in the future in the form of lower rates of violent crime and spousal assault.”

Finkelhor noted that anti-bullying programs had proliferated and received funding boosts following the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado.

“There is evidence these programs are effective,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re seeing the fruits of that.”

One of the largest of these initiatives is the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, which has been implemented in several thousand U.S. schools. It is a comprehensive program that includes forming an anti-bullying committee, training staff to intervene immediately if they observe bullying and meeting with students and parents when problems occur.

Marlene Snyder, of Clemson University’s Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life, who is director of development for Olweus, said the survey was heartening to those in the anti-bullying field but not cause for complacency.

“The decline is not happening everywhere,” she said. “It’s in schools where adults really understand how detrimental this conduct can be and have made a conscious effort to bring these numbers down.”

The findings by Finkelhor and his co-authors were based on two national surveys of children ages 2 to 17 conducted five years apart – the first in 2003, involving 2,030 children, and the second in 2008, asking the same questions of 4,046 children. The findings were published this week in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Children aged 10-17 were interviewed directly about various forms of violence and victimization they had experienced. In the cases of children under 10, parents or other caregivers were interviewed.

The researchers said the biggest declines in the various forms of violence and bullying were among children from low-income households.

Snyder said this finding meshed with observations by the Olweus staff.

“Many of the grants have been awarded to large inner-city schools where crime and violence rates had been high and economic conditions were low,” she said. “We’ve seen that when those communities have had the money, they could be successful.”

Snyder cautioned that even schools making headway against bullying programs should remain vigilant.

“You have to keep at it, training new teachers every year – not just training one time and you’re done,” she said. “I hope this progress holds because, frankly, when they have to make hard decisions, these are the kind of programs that often fall under the financial ax.”

Diane Cargile, president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, said she was pleased but not surprised by the survey’s findings.

“I know the efforts that principals and teachers have made to be sure they have a safe school – from the ride on the bus in the morning, through the day at school, to the ride home,” said Cargile, principal at Rio Grande Elementary School in Terre Haute, Ind.

She said the anti-bullying initiatives have made many children more willing to seek help from adults when they are targeted.

Along with bullying and assaults by peers or siblings, the new study also found declines in several other forms of child victimization, including sexual assaults and emotional abuse by caregivers. It found slight increases in dating violence, robbery targeting children and the witnessing of violence among other family members.

The survey did not specifically address the bullying of young people for reasons related to sexual orientation, which gay-rights groups consider to be a pervasive problem. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network said its research indicates this type of harassment remained stable between 2001 and 2007.

Overall, the findings by Finkelhor and his co-authors were positive – and came on the heels of a major federal study documenting an unprecedented decrease in incidents of serious child abuse. That report, the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, found that incidents of serious physical, sexual or emotional abuse dropped by 26 percent from 1993 to 2005-06.

Professor James Garbarino, an expert on childhood aggression at Loyola University’s Center for the Human Rights of Children in Chicago, drew an analogy between the campaign against bullying and efforts that began even earlier to combat domestic violence.

“If you pay attention to a phenomenon and devote some resources to dealing with it, praise the Lord, sometimes we actually improve things,” he said. “It’s gotten on people’s radar. There have been more and more challenges to the myths that bullying can be good for kids, that it builds strength.”

• Now that’s not funny. O.K. I am not sure I want to share this one. It is with deep sadness that I must tell you of the talented comedienne who is now a bit of a crack pot. Victoria Jackson, who was once a dizzy blond cast member of Saturday Night Live and is now a paranoid shill for the Tea Party Movement. I just couldn’t believe it. I have to admit that I wasn’t aware of her previous steps into far right wing worship. Ms. Jackson has put together a little song/video for a Tea Party organization called “There’s a Communist in the White House”. For a second I thought it was a skit, but I was, sadly, mistaken.

• This is war! There is a rising trend in South Africa of lesbian rape/murder. ActionAid UK reports that lesbians are being target by men (sometimes groups of men) to “cure” them using “corrective” rape. Since 1998 there have been 31 cases but the number is likely much larger since hate crimes are not recognized in South Africa. One GLBT group has reported that they respond to ten new cases each week of lesbians who are targets for “corrective” rape in Cape Town. I say it’s time to take up arms, sisters!

Image Source: Jes Foord Foundation - P.O.W.A.R.

• Florida sucks. A 61 year old LPN has been removed from his position by the state of Florida because he was convicted of a lewd act 34 years ago. In 1976, Ray Fetcho was the drag queen named Tiny Tina. He hosted the Wet Jockey Shorts contest at the Copa in Dania Beach and was arrested for throwing water on the briefs of the contest contestants. That small act (one that is practiced in gay and straight bars all over the country) got Ray convicted of promoting lewd and lascivious behavior. The state licensing agency during a screening of nursing home employees turned up this decades old conviction and has barred Fetcho from working as a LPN in the state of Florida unless he is able to get an exemption from the agency. Fetcho looks like he is ready to fight, “I never mixed my two careers together. One was show business, one was real. I had the best of both possible worlds but if I have to fight today to help some other nurse tomorrow, they are going to have to fight ‘The Queen’ in her court.” You can’t keep a good queen down!

Image Source: South Floriday Gay News

• Who needs Manhunt at the Vatican. A papal aid, Angelo Balducci, is expected to be charged in a gay prostitution scandal. Balducci would contact two men who sang in St. Peter’s Cappella Giulia to provide him with male prostitutes. These prostitutes were not your run of the mill prostitutes. They included young male choir members, seminarians and undocumented workers. The Vatican has denied that any priests or seminarians were involved in the sex ring but wiretaps would say otherwise. Balducci is heard in at least one of the overheard conversations saying “He, when does he have to return to the seminary?”. We all know the ongoing anti-gay crusades of the latest Catholic Pope, but what do they say….glass houses???

“Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who joined 16 other Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in writing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.

The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said.

The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, “healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it.”

Brian Moulton, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign,the nation’s largest gay rights group, said they are hopeful that the policy, last reviewed in 2006, will change under President Barack Obama, “who is interested in looking at all the policies that have a discriminatory effect.” The goal, he said, is “to have policies in place that are based on the science” rather than “any discriminatory idea about our community.”

The senators’ letter noted that in March 2006, the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers and the American Association of Blood Banks reported to an FDA-sponsored workshop that the ban “is medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

The FDA, in a statement, said that “while FDA appreciates concerns about perceived discrimination, our decision to maintain the deferral policy is based on current science and data and does not give weight to a donor’s sexual orientation.”

It said that while some groups favor relaxing restrictions, others, “such as those representing the hemophilia community, support continuation of the current policy.”

People with hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, require periodic transfusions and in the past, before screening techniques were improved to ensure blood was HIV-free, were among those most at risk of contracting the virus.

Kerry compared the effort to lift the blood donation ban to legislation he backed in 2008 to end the law banning people with HIV from traveling and immigrating to the United States. That ban was lifted last year.

Also signing the letter were Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Dick Durbin and Roland Burris of Illinois, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Al Franken of Minnesota, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Carl Levin of Michigan, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Mark Begich of Alaska.