Ed Note: Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. [...]

One of my guilty pleasures in this run-up to the next U.S. presidential election is watching proudly ignorant Republican wannabes like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann lashing out at each other instead of Obama. The Minnesota representative recently attacked the Texas governor for proposing in 2007 that pre-pubescent girls in his state be vaccinated against [...]

Recently, while I was getting drinks at a pub with about a dozen or so other biologists, I was involved in a very animated discussion about circumcision — because that’s what biologists argue about when they’re drinking, apparently. "They do it to increase stamina. It desensitizes the penis," said a microbiologist. (There’s some evidence to [...]

Evidence for the long-term health benefits of circumcision for newborn boys has been mounting for years. Today the influential group the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) declared that the procedure is, indeed, beneficial—and that it should be covered by public and private health insurance plans. The recommendation was published online August 27 in Pediatrics. Previously [...]

By now, you’re probably aware of the hype over a vaccine associated with these three letters: HPV. Designed to prevent people from acquiring human papillomavirus, some strains of which can lead to cervical, vulval, anal and vaginal cancer in women not to mention cancers of the anus and penis in men, the HPV vaccine has [...]

LINDAU, Germany—A vaccine to prevent infections of cancer-causing human papilloma virus (HPV) is currently approved for use in the U.S. in boys and girls and in the U.K. in girls. The U.S. public health campaign focuses on vaccinating girls. The virologist who won a Nobel Prize for confirming that HPV causes cervical cancer supports educational [...]

The Pap test has been enormously successful at reducing cervical cancer deaths, but it can miss early signs of malignancy, allowing undetected cases to become invasive. New research from a large-scale screening program shows that testing the DNA from the human papillomavirus (HPV) in a sample of cervix cells appears to be better at detecting [...]

An advisory panel for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the use of Gardasil, a vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV), for use in males. A new study, published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, found, however, that a public health campaign to vaccinate boys—in addition to girls, who have been receiving [...]