"It's a girl -- she's 3.3 million years old, almost human." People say that about me all the time.

Thank you for making me laugh this morning. I needed that. Some days, don't we all feel like we could match that short description? Especially the age and "almost human" part.

Happy weekend!

P.S. Now seriously, what did you expect from Maxim? That they'd like anyone different from Paris Hilton look-alikes in size 0 clothing and an IQ to match? ;-)

I can't believe Pam Grier could ever be put on a list like that. I guess I never realized Maxim was written by blind gay men.

Perhaps they've forgotten the basic uselessness of screening a low prevalence population. They will be overwhelmed by false positives, who will be horrified to learn that they maybe have a deadly disease, an STD at that. And at this point you can't tell the difference between the false positives and those who truly have HIV infection. All those people will then have to go through retesting, meanwhile enduring the waiting.

We went through this in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when there were proposals that HIV testing be required for marriage licenses (replacing the Wasserman test for syphilis, which was dropped because syphilis was rare, especially among young couples applying for marriage licenses, so the testing process generated almost nothing but false positives). The consensus at the time was that this was expensive and useless public health policy. And yet now we hear:

"I think it's an incredible advance. I think it's courageous on the part of the CDC," said A. David Paltiel, a health policy expert at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Idiocy!

For a disease transmitted through sexual contact and sharing if IV drug needles? When being drug-free, celibate, or monogamous lowers your risk to zero and practicing safe sex lowers it to nearly zero?

This makes no sense medically or fiscally. Test those at risk. Don't put the rest of us through an exercise in waste and potential confusion over false positive results.