Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!usc!aero!nadel
From: nadel@aerospace.aero.org (Miriam H. Nadel)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Women and Medical Research
Message-ID: <56026@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Date: 15 Aug 89 20:21:16 GMT
Reply-To: nadel@aero.UUCP (Miriam H. Nadel)
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA
Lines: 34
Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org


First off, for those wondering - yes this group is alive but Ambar and I
cannot send out articles unless we get them from you.  I can't speak for
anyone else, but I've been way too busy to generate much myself and I'm
trying to keep people from feeling that I (or any of the other moderators)
"own" the group.

Now what I really wanted to bring up has to do with a couple of things which
are very big issues in the world today.  I received a flyer concerning
AIDS and lesbians and I think some of the information on it is well worth
passing along.  There have been instances of woman to woman transmission of
HIV but statistics are not well known because there is no recording category
for lesbian transmission of HIV.  The percentage of women with AIDS in the
"unknown means of transmission" category is much higher than the percentage
of men with AIDS who fall into that category.  Women's organizations are
also concerned that experimental drugs are not being tested on women.  In the
specific cases of both AZT and Compound W, women were specifically excluded
from test trials because of fears that reproductive organs would be affected
by the drugs.  However, when a drug is approved, it can be used on women,
without long term effects being known.

When I was reading this it struck me how much medical research in areas other
than contraception is biased toward men.  The usual explanation is that
researchers don't want to "corrupt" data due to fluctuating hormonal status
(i.e. the menstrual cycle) but men *also* have hormonal cycles.  And, even if
hormones can be an influence, don't we need to know that so that results
can correctly be applied to women?  (One example which comes to mind is the
protective effect of estrogen on the heart.  Advice on cardiovascular health
which ignores this is, at best, naive.)

Comments?


Miriam Nadel