NEWSLETTER

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Photo by Tim Barber

Good news! Unless you’re a needle-sharing junkie loser homo or someone who likes to indulge in rough, bloody, rawdog bumfucking with one-eyed whores in African shantytowns, then the chance of you contracting HIV is getting slimmer and slimmer all the time.

Right now, a nonprofit group of doctors (who’ve saddled themselves with the rather ungainly title of the International Partnership for Microbicides) is working on a magic new product that can stop boys getting HIV from girls and girls with HIV giving it to boys.

Condom manufacturers all over the world are going to shit themselves when the patent for this amazing new superlube is passed because all girls have to do is rub it inside their vaginas (or mouths or bums) and it stops them giving or taking away. It’s kind of like KY jelly but with added amazing, life-saving powers.

Professor Richard Markham is the director of the Center for AIDS Research at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Maryland (where the IPM is based) and he’s one of the main people responsible for developing the superlube. Right now, he’s testing it on monkeys and it’s working like a dream. Humans come next.

The Prof told us, “The new product is a microbicide that could be applied as infrequently as once a week or even once a month. It’s transparent to the user, and controlled by the woman, which is an especially important issue in the developing world). 

“The process involves engineering the normal bacterial flora of the vagina (lactobacilli that are related to the bacteria in yogurt) to secrete a product that inhibits HIV transmission.”

In January of this year, sciencemag.org reported on the new superlube and said that it’d be at least seven years before it’s available for public consumption, but our Prof is hopeful that it will be available before New Year’s Eve 2003.

“I think the time frame for their use outlined in the article is overly pessimistic,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t really put this idea into the public domain until all patents have cleared so don’t run this article yet.”

ANDY CAPPER

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