International AIDS conference

This is something that really caught my attention lately.

The 16th International AIDS Conference has opened up this weekend, and there's been plenty of coverage on CBC. In particular, there was a facinating interview with Stephen Lewis, one of the best known UN Special Envoys for HIV-AIDS. I especially admire this man in his fight to bring more recognition to the effects of this global disease. He's earned much respect in the world, and has also garnered many enemies for being outspoken against South Africa and the United States on their policies towards controlling HIV-AIDS.

We in Canada have been fortunate enough where the growth of AIDS has slowed (but not stopped) in North America, but it's still spreading wildly throughout Africa. During the CBC interview, Stephen Lewis identified how African women in particular are in acute risk. Due to a highly male-dominated society, women have very little say in refusing sexual advances by men and have no control whether contraception is used. The statement that surprised me was that married women, who were often married to much older men, were at greater risk of contracting HIV. Males would often have many partners throughout their lives, and would continue to spread HIV to their wives. People have identified that greater empowerment and education of women in their society would greatly reduce the incidents of AIDS. But due to the huge problems in Africa right now, such as war and famine, it's a daunting task to establish these education programs. This is made even more daunting in countries like South Africa, where they won't even acknowledge how HIV is transmitted from person to person.

Due to the huge scale of the problem and the enormous resources required to fight this disease, I'm truly puzzled (and a bit angry) that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has chosen to skip this conference. Instead, he has chosen to go to the north, and concentrate on announcements on Arctic soverignty. I've given our Prime Minister a lot of slack, since this government is fairly new. I was willing to put up with some hiccups as the new government minsters got more experience in running a government. But the PM's decision not to address the AIDS conference is an outright embarrassment to the country. Canada needs to do its share to fight this disease. I'm saddened to see that this issue isn't considered important by the government.

Fight AIDS and Malaria at home

Some of you may have heard of SETI@Home, a project that puts together the computing power of thousands of computer to help compute the signals from the SETI program. The SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) utilized the screensavers of thousands of computers to create a virtual super computer. This type of technology is now being used for some worthy humanitarian purposes. Sure beats looking for little green men! :)

World Community Grid
This is an effort by IBM to create the world's largest computing grid, and is used to design new HIV drugs based on molecular structure on the Fight AIDS@Home project. It has also been used to predict the shape of human proteins for the Human Proteome Project. I've been running this on my home computer for about a year.

Africa@Home
This is a new grid computing project aimed at humanitarian causes in Africa. It was just released to the public this week, and the first project is to tackle malaria. They are trying to involve African students and university to develop and run these projects. Using normal methods, it would take 40 years to complete the required calculations. With grid computing, this can be completed within a few months. I'll be installing this on my home computer shortly.

For those who are curious about using massive computing grids to solve humanitarian problems, I encourage you to take a look at these projects and participate.

[Great news: The World Community Grid is starting to tackle a cancer project too!]