WEARING WHAT WEDNESDAY!!!

Yea! Wearing What Wednesday is back -- the last post was June 10th, if you can believe it. See, there's this new hot-and-botheredness growing over Ryan Reynolds because he's partially naked in his new movie, The Proposal. And apparently he had some recent cover shoot which brought all the boys to the yard because of his sheer gorgeousness.

And can I say that I have been a huge fan of the man ever since Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place. I certainly never watched that sitcom for his acting. And now since he looks like this:

But Mr. Reynolds is not shy in front of the camera, as per this scene from Buying the Cow:

Which is really the whole reason I posted this blog this morning. But, for your hot blog of the week? You have to admit it (otherwise, I'm calling you a liar) that you've had a crush on a hot cartoon or superhero at some point in your life.

Thank god there's the Shirtless Superheroes blog to remind us just how hot and how dirty that makes us all feel. :-) That's Peter Parker in the picture, btw.

And to my readers who love the hairy types: I recommend LifeLube's WOOF WEDNESDAY's. Trust.

Rectal Chlamydia!!!!

We just learned about gonoccocal urethritis in class and four things struck me: in our discussion of STDs and nursing care, we barely talked about HIV; we only talked about urethral and vaginal infections; the med class fluroquinolones (typical treatment for gonorrhea) is contraindicated in men who have sex with men with gonorrhea due to risk of resistance; and my standards are really low if I think the Christian rapper at school is hot with his awful skin.

Anyways... (via LifeLube, via AIDSMap)

Gay men should have rectal tests for chlamydia as part of their routine sexual health care, investigators recommend in an article published in the online edition of Sexually Transmitted Infections. Researchers found that more gay men had rectal infection with chlamydia than had urethral chlamydia or rectal gonorrhoea. Furthermore, the majority of rectal chlamydia infections were asymptomatic and would therefore have been missed without routine testing.

They also found that over a third of the men with rectal chlamydia were HIV-positive.

Right. So, I told you that.


What I should also tell gay men is this: you should probably have an anal pap smear done to check for carcinogenic growths related to anal HPV, and you should probably encourage the FDA to start testing the HPV vaccine on men against the above mentioned disease.


YEA! STDs!!! Aren't they fun?

Two Conferences *I* Want to Go to

2009 LGBTI Health Summit in Chicago, IL
August 14-18, 2009 -- As seen on Lifelube!!!

I told them like a month ago that I would repost this information, and, look, I finally did! This is the mission of the conference:

The 2009 National LGBTI (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex) Health Summit is an event dedicated to preserving and improving the emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual, psychological, environmental, and social health and wellness of LGBTI people, a population that continues to experience significant health disparities because of its members’ sexual orientations and/or gender identities.

While the summit will include speakers, panels, workshops, pre-summit institutes and organizing meetings, it will also include interactive exercises, such as experiential education activities, yoga and other forms of self and communal care, as well as creative festivities. The Summit will address a range of topics that includes, but is not limited to:

• LGBTI health through the life course
• Understanding LGBTI history and its health impacts
• Wellness for all of our communities
• Bisexual visibility & well-being
• Health leadership
• Health care access
• Frontiers in HIV/AIDS and STD prevention and care
• New HIV prevention technologies like microbicides and PrEP
• Youth and elder strategies
• Tobacco and LGBTI health
• The role of alcohol and other substances in LGBTI communities
• Universal Health Care and other paths to good LGBTI health
• LGBTI Spirituality and its role in the health of individuals and communities
• Culturally competent LGBTI mental health research and programming
• Self-care for the community organizer
• Marriage equality as a health strategy
• Addressing racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia to enable healing
• Diversity of family structures as a part of LGBTI health
• Understanding our identities and our bodies: what does it mean to be L,G,B,T or I?

Doesn't it sound wonderful? I've also been listed as an official endorser of the event. (even though they promised they would Blogroll me and haven't, I still love the somewhat NSFW Lifelube blog)

MBGLTACC
February 13-15, 2009, in beautiful Bloomington, IN
I was really unsure about going to this... but the fabulous T. Black from IMPACT Cincinnati eventually told me I was going. I am, after all, a college student again. So, I guess I'm going :-); of course, being shown around by the "celebrity" BadEvan won't be so bad at all either.

I may also be hosting a small blogger break out or social hour with the aforementioned "celebrity." :-)

HIV/AIDS: New Numbers Released

The CDC now estimates the new HIV infection rate is about 56,000 people a year, up 16,000 from the 40,000 that has been estimated for years.

Ouch.

New technology and methodology developed by CDC show that the incidence of HIV in the United States is higher than was previously known. However, the incidence has been stable at that higher level for most of this decade. HIV incidence is the number of new HIV infections occurring during a certain time period, in this case, the year 2006.

These findings, published by in a special HIV/AIDS issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that was released August 3, 2008, show that in 2006, an estimated 56,300 new HIV infections occurred – a number that is substantially higher than the previous estimate of 40,000 annual new infections. It should be noted that the new incidence estimate does not represent an actual increase in the numbers of HIV infections. Rather, a separate CDC historical trend analysis published as part of this study suggests that the annual number of new infections was never as low as 40,000 and that it has been roughly stable since the late 1990s (with estimates ranging between 55,000 and 58,500 during the three most recent time periods analyzed).

(from the CDC announcement)

And the breakdown by risk factor:

Thanks to the LifeLube blog for the heads up -- and don't forget to read the excellent press release the AIDS Foundation of Chicago put out.

BLOGGING: Two new queer blogs

Added two new blogs to the blog roll:


1) LifeLube.org -- an excellent blog out of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. When I started the AVOC Myspace, this is what I dreamed it would be.






2) The Bilerico Project: Daily Experiment in the LGBTQ -- I have referenced them before. It's an excellent blog.






(Pictures courtesy of the representative blog)