invertprivileges: effervescentwoman: :/ “Women represent 55% of HIV-positive adults in the dev
invertprivileges:effervescentwoman::/“Women represent 55% of HIV-positive adults in the developing world,31 and in parts of Africa and the Caribbean women aged five to twenty-four are up to six times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men of the same age.32 We also know that women experience different clinical symptoms and complications due to HIV, and yet a 2016 review of the inclusion of women in US HIV research found that women made up only 19.2% of participants in antiretroviral studies, 38.1% in vaccination studies and 11.1% in studies to find a cure.33…The male norm continues to go unquestioned by many today, with some researchers continuing to insist, in the face of all the evidence, that biological sex doesn’t matter. One public-health researcher revealed that she had received the following feedback on two different grant applications: ‘I wish you’d stop with all this sex stuff and get back to science’, and ‘I’ve been in this field for 20 years and this [biological difference] doesn’t matter’.41 It isn’t just anonymous notes, either. A 2014 op-ed published in the journal Scientific American complained that including both sexes in experiments was a waste of resources;42 in 2015 an op-ed in the official scientific journal of the US National Academy of Sciences insisted that ‘focusing on preclinical sex differences will not address women’s and men’s health disparities’.43 Alongside insisting that sex differences don’t matter, some researchers advocate against the inclusion of women in research on the basis that while biological sex may matter, the lack of comparable data arising from the historical data gap makes including women inadvisable (talk about adding insult to injury).44 Female bodies (both the human and animal variety) are, it is argued, too complex, too variable,45 too costly to be tested on. Integrating sex and gender into research is seen as ‘burdensome’.46 It is seen as possible for there to be ‘too much gender’,47 and for its exclusion to be acceptable on the basis of ‘simplification’48 – in which case it’s worth noting that recent studies on mice have actually shown greater variability in males on a number of markers.49 So who’s too complicated now?…In 2000 the FDA forced drug manufacturers to remove phenylpropanolamine, a component of many over-the-counter medications, from all products because of a reported increased risk of bleeding into the brain or into tissue around the brain in women, but not in men.124 Drug-induced acute liver failure has also been reported more often in women,125 and certain HIV medications are six to eight times more likely to cause an adverse drug reaction (ADR) in women.126”Excerpt From: Caroline Criado Perez. “Invisible Women.” Apple Books. -- source link
#misogyny#medicine