AIDS, Teen Sex Researchers Feel Conservatives' Pressure

[Nambe]

By MARK SHERMAN The Associated Press

--- NIH is telephoning 157 such researchers, including four at Florida universities, none in the Tampa Bay area, who were awarded grants for projects on AIDS and sexual practices. The calls were in response to complaints from the conservative Traditional Values Coalition.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the phone calls to the scientists are ``sending a dangerous message'' that research is being subverted to an ideological agenda. ---

NIH spokesman John Burklow said his agency simply was responding to a request from Republican lawmakers who were given a list of the research grants. The projects include studying subjects such as teenagers' sexual activity, sex and drug use among truckers and sexually transmitted diseases among Mexican immigrants.

Burklow said the calls were not intended to threaten researchers that they could lose their funding but to inform them their names were on a list being circulated in Washington.. But researchers at Florida universities who received calls from the agency asking about their work fear this could be the start of a campaign to pressure NIH away from funding mainstream HIV and AIDS prevention efforts. ---



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[xxqqqzme]

1. what next????????

????????????????????????

Total, absolute and utter disgust!

[Vogon_Glory]

2. Far Right's Fanaticism Trumps Research

Should it be any surprise to anyone that Radical Right groups like the so-called "Traditional Values Coalition" are able to influence what scientists can and cannot study--especially if scientific research has the potential of disproving their pet religious shibboleths.

Slowly, but steadily, the Far Right's efforts to foist their agenda on the rest of us is not only curtailing scientific freedom, but also the technical edge that the US has enjoyed for over four decades after World War II. We're already seeing it with the stem cell brouhaha earlier, the Far Right's efforts to let timbering activities commence national forests and wild areas even at the risk of damaging organizsms that could be studied for biotech apllications.

Moreover, the Far Right's extremist agenda is threatening public health. By enacting right-wing fantasies that having the state just proclaim "No!," the right wing is setting up the circumstances for a rise in HIV, Hepatitus C, and other venereal diseases.

We have the Far Right expanding the scope of voodoo medicine from economics to public health.

[MisterP]

3. oh, good lord, what next?

wait, don't tell me!

[Endangered Specie]

4. If we lose our technological edge

Then in will be caught up by others elsewhere... When the fundies cant afford the rich luxuries, they might turn around.

Either that, or the scientists will move else where, where they move, money will follow, thereby weaking our position as the only superpower which, (seeing what we do with that power lately) wouldnt be too bad for the rest of the world.

America's not the only nation in the world ya know.