HIV Death Rates Rising in Muslim Countries & Russia

“[Muslim] People are becoming more sexually active with no proper education or awareness,” said Johnny Tohme, a social worker with Marsa, the only Lebanese clinic that offers free HIV testing. Between 1,500 and 3,500 people are living with HIV in Lebanon today, according to figures from Marsa and UNAIDS.

“And with the growth of new infections, if no proper-follow up is administered, the infection is going to spread faster,” he said.

The Arab-wide picture is just as bleak. The Middle East and North Africa maintain just one percent of the world’s HIV caseload, with approximately 300,000 adults and children living with the virus, according to the United Nations.

But the fatality rate for AIDS patients has increased significantly in recent years, while in most of the rest of the world deaths have either stayed the same or dropped. _Global Post

From North Africa to the Middle East to Central Asia, HIV death rates have risen almost 20% across the traditional Muslim homelands.

...two regions saw significant increases – AIDS-related deaths went up by 17 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and by more than 20 percent across Eastern Europe and Central Asia...

...New HIV cases in Russia:

The public health office says more than 60,000 people tested positive for HIV in the first 10 months of 2012 – up 12.5 percent on the previous year
Almost 2/3 of those who tested positive were male – the overall sickness rate was highest in the 30-40 age group
The mortality rate in this same period grew by 14 percent _Al Jazeera

The New York Times reveals that the problem in the Muslim world has been growing for some time:

AIDS is on the rise in many Muslim countries, driven by men having sex with other men in secret because of homophobia, religious intolerance and fear of being jailed or executed, according to a new study.

...Accurate statistics on some aspects of health are hard to get from governments in some Middle Eastern countries. For example, international health authorities say that the world’s highest rates of birth defects are in Muslim countries where cousins sometimes marry, but that governments are reluctant to admit it. _NYT

The problem of inaccurate statistics may be even worse -- much worse -- in the sub Saharan African countries, which are supposedly experiencing significant drops in HIV incidence and mortality. But the numbers are only as good as the methods used to acquire them, and in nations such as South Africa and Zimbabwe, the public health apparatus has fallen on hard times.

Wall Street Journal

Another important public health problem knocking on the door for both the Muslim world and the more modern region of Europe, is tuberculosis -- TB.

All along the edges of Western Europe, new and hard-to-defeat strains of tuberculosis are gaining a foothold, often moving beyond traditional victims—alcoholics, drug users, HIV patients—and into the wider population. _WSJ

Chinese Neurosurgeons Take Aggressive Approach to Addiction

The problem of drug addiction is rampant over most of the world. In most countries, the official response to drug addiction is minimal or nonexistent. In advanced western countries, the official approach to treating drug addiction involves behavioural treatments, 12 step treatments, and various medications, including methadone.

But in China, the surgical approach to treating drug addiction is more popular.

Surgeons use heat to kill cells in small sections of both sides of the brain’s nucleus accumbens. That region is saturated with neurons containing dopamine and endogenous opioids, which are involved in pleasure and desire related both to drugs and to ordinary experiences like eating, love and sex. _Nucleus Accumbens Ablation

By taking away the pleasure of the addiction, Chinese neurosurgeons hope to stop the addiction itself.

The procedure involves drilling small holes into the skulls of patients and inserting long electrodes which extend down to the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. This area, often referred to as the “pleasure center” of the brain, is the major nucleus of the brain’s reward circuit. The neurotransmitter dopamine stimulates cells here to elicit the pleasurable sensations we get from eating fatty foods, getting a job promotion, or taking heroin. Electrical current is passed through the electrodes which kill the cells of the nucleus accumbens. By ridding the addicts of their pleasure centers, doctors hope to rid them of their addictions as well. The surgery is performed while the patients are awake to minimize the chance of damaging regions involved in sensation, movement or consciousness. _SingularityHub

The results are mixed, with some Chinese analyses suggesting that particular surgical approaches can bring about a larger number of "cures" than less invasive approaches.

Side effects are common, including loss of motivation, personality changes, and sometimes decreased intelligence and motor control.

In a country like China, where political prisoners are used as organ donors for the wealthy and politically connected, one should expect to see a more daring approach to brain surgery, than one might see in North America or Europe.

It is possible that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the types of neurosurgery which are actually being carried out in China. Hidden archives may well exist, containing reports of more daring surgical procedures meant to achieve more profound levels of behavioural control over subjects.

If it is okay to take a political prisoner's kidney, liver, or lung, certainly there should be no ethical restraints over modifying the same prisoner's behaviour -- one way or another.

I seem to recall another totalitarian political regime that carried out similar forms of avant-garde experimentation on political prisoners. I just can't think of which other totalitarian state it was. Don't tell me, it will come.

Anyway. You may consider which would be worse: to suffer from a drug addiction, or to have a significant part of your brain destroyed, leaving you without the ability to experience a wide range of normal human pleasures?