Megan Fox is being sued

The obnoxious creationist is not being sued for being a world-class ignoramus, however — that’s perfectly legal. She’s being sued for interfering with the education of children.

She’s been on a bender of offense because her local library provides open internet access to the public, and apparently she once saw someone viewing porn on a library computer. Most normal people would point this out to a librarian, who would politely ask the person to move on, but no, not Megan Fox! She is outraged! So she’s been harrassing the library staff.

She’s upset that the library provides unfiltered access to the internet (sounds like a good library to me). The legal documents (pdf) list a great many of Fox’s offenses against truth: she has posted photos of the librarian’s home (creepy!), has falsely accused her of drunkenness at work and of making anti-gay slurs, and has disrupted library board meetings. But the real nuisance is how she’s been abusing the law to torment librarians.

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The Lancet done screwed up

Chelsea Polis and Kathryn Curtis wrote a paper that asked whether hormonal contraceptives affected your likelihood of being infected with HIV, Use of hormonal contraceptives and HIV acquisition in women: a systematic review of the epidemiological evidence. Here’s the abstract:

Whether or not the use of hormonal contraception affects risk of HIV acquisition is an important question for public health. We did a systematic review, searching PubMed and Embase, aiming to explore the possibility of an association between various forms of hormonal contraception and risk of HIV acquisition. We identified 20 relevant prospective studies, eight of which met our minimum quality criteria. Of these eight, all reported findings for progestin-only injectables, and seven also reported findings for oral contraceptive pills. Most of the studies that assessed the use of oral contraceptive pills showed no significant association with HIV acquisition. None of the three studies that assessed the use of injectable norethisterone enanthate showed a significant association with HIV acquisition. Studies that assessed the use of depot-medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) or non-specified injectable contraceptives had heterogeneous methods and mixed results, with some investigators noting a 1·5—2·2 times increased risk of HIV acquisition, and others reporting no association. Thus, some, but not all, observational data raise concern about a potential association between use of DMPA and risk of HIV acquisition. More definitive evidence for the existence and size of any potential effect could inform appropriate counselling and policy responses in countries with varied profiles of HIV risk, maternal mortality, and access to contraceptive services.

In short, hormonal contraceptives don’t affect your chances of getting AIDS, with the possible exception of DMPA (better known as Depo-Provera), which a few studies with different methods found to elevate the risk. So, basically, it’s saying that there’s not a problem with contraception endangering women in this regard, but that inconsistent results with Depo-Provera warrant further investigation (later, they would publish an update (pdf) that suggests women ought to be warned about the uncertainty of this side effect of Depo-Provera). It seems reasonable. So they sent it off to The Lancet for review and publication, and that’s where the mess began.

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