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More than half the 37.5 million people living with HIV worldwide are female. Every week 7,500 young women are infected, and globally HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death of women aged fifteen to forty-four.
Judging risk is a complicated science, so numbers vary widely. The chances a woman may pass HIV to a male sexual partner, for example, are 1 in 700 to 3,000 exposures. From a man to a woman, the risk is 1 in 200 to 2,000 exposures. Needle sharing is 1 in 150.
Sixty-two Sing Sing inmates volunteered in 1953 to have themselves injected with syphilis. Nearly half developed the disease, which attacks the eyes, brain, heart, liver, bones, and joints, and which can kill. In return, they got ‘a carton of cigarettes brought in by the doctors at Christmas time, a brief note on their records, and the good feeling which comes from having done something to help others’.
It had been tested previously on chimpanzees, but animal testing was expensive. Bloom decided that quality controls would be better – and less costly – if they were carried out on haemophiliacs who had not yet been exposed to large pooled products.34 The candidates were called PUPs, for previously untreated patients.
No PUPs were told that they were a human experiment. One was Colin Smith, treated by Bloom. He died of AIDS at the age of seven.
In Jamu, this village in western Nepal, Radha’s status is already an inferior one. She is ironsmith caste, a low person. When she menstruates, her status drops further. She is only sixteen, yet for the length of her period, Radha can’t enter her family house or eat anything but boiled rice. She can’t touch other women, not even her grandmother or sister, because contact with her will pollute them.
In this way, the foetus has a direct line to the mother’s main blood supply. ‘It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her,’ writes the biologist Suzanne Sadedin. ‘It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients.’
Lebanese customs officials recently seized a half-ton shipment of sanitary pads that were found to be severely radioactive. The pads were made in China by a company claiming they contained anions, groups of negatively charged ionized atoms that apparently had health benefits if you put them in your pants and bled into them.
Bleeding is caused by what clinicians call ‘derangement’ of the body’s physiology. It happens fast. A quarter of all bleeding deaths occur within three hours of injury, says Brohi, and most severely bleeding patients are dead within six.
They were wise to do this: when the biochemist Clive McCay at Cornell University stitched together sixty-nine pairs of rats in 1956 (two by two), he learned two important things. The older and younger rats reacted differently to the same dose of barbiturate. And patience was essential. ‘If two rats are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the head of the other until it is destroyed.’
He is wrong about the average blood donor: in the United States, it is a white college-educated man aged between thirty and fifty who is married and has an above-average income.
And I salute the mice and rats who continue to be stitched together, although now they are shaved not soap-chipped, and joined at knee and elbow not torso, and they are female usually, as female mice are less likely to chew each other’s heads off.
He attempted the infusion of three ounces of milk obtained from a healthy postpartum woman. The patient, a woman with suppurative lung disease, complained of pain in her chest and back shortly after the injection began, and stopped breathing after two ounces had been given; however, she was resuscitated by artificial respiration and by ‘injections of morphine and whiskey’.
