HEAL London

For years at any public event we've been bombarded with people wearing large and overly visible red ribbons, particularly on World AIDS Day, culminating in the ridiculous image in 2007 on Pop Idol where contestants were wearing such huge ribbons they must have been visible from satellites.

So what does the ribbon mean? And why can't re-thinkers about AIDS support it?

Celia Farber, the author of the controversial 2006 Harpers magazine article, 'Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science', has filed a libel suit against three prominent commentators who support the AIDS orthdoxy. Her article attracted a lot of attention, and Robert Gallo lent his name to a document called 'Errors in Celia Farber's March 2006 article in Harpers Magazine', listing what they claimed were 56 specific errors. This was extensively rebutted and documented by Rethinking AIDS and others.

The first candidate for the annual ‘science stating the bleeding obvious' prize of 2009 is a study just published that shows that quality and length of sleep can affect your immune system. Specifically, getting less sleep and / or poorer quality sleep makes your immune system less able to fight off infections. This should surely not be a big surprise to most people who have at some point in their lives been run down to some extent and have had less than adequate quantity and quality of sleep. But clearly, scientists felt it was important enough to get some quantitative measure of effect.