The gay rights group Rainbow Wellington is taking the New Zealand Blood Service to the Human Rights Commission over the restrictions on sexually active homosexual men giving blood. Frankly, I think this is a stupid waste of the scarce resources of the New Zealand Blood Service, who can ill afford HRC lawyers. It is an [...]

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers the world over will be very happy that there is now reliable evidence that the  virus XMRV is a likely cause of CFS. XMRV is a retrovirus found in rats, which has previously been implicated in certain type of aggressive prostate cancer. This study ably demonstrates that 67% of CFS sufferers carry the [...]

Stuff reports on a new vaccine that has been shown to provide some protection against AIDS. The vaccine was shown to reduce the incidence of contracting the disease by 31%. All other vaccines against AIDS have been abject failures.  While this is indeed great news, the MacDoctor cautions against breaking out the champaign. 31% is [...]

Chuck Bird suggested that I hold forth my opinion of the proposed new deferral periods for Blood Donors that Stephen Franks has recently blogged about. A deferral period is how long you have to wait between doing something that might infect your blood and actually donating blood. For instance, the deferral period for using a [...]