Studies show that behavior modification works in the fight against AIDS

Darkfrog submitted, created time 3 months 2 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

When I first read this headline, I thought that "behavior modification" meant only telling people to stop having sex, but it seems that delaying sex, using condoms and stopping drug abuse are here considered behavior modification as well.

"One is misplaced pessimism about the effectiveness of H.I.V. prevention strategies. A second is confusing the difficulty in changing human behavior with an inability to do so." Yeah, sing it! "They won't stop having sex just because we tell them to," does seem to be the assumption on the liberal side. It seems that, in this case, humility is misplaced.

3 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: human behavior behavior modification AIDS HIV HIV prevention HIV pandemic AIDS pandemic

Parasites alter community structure

Dolly submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.pnas.org)

Along the northern Atlantic coast of North America, the dominant herbivorous snail Littorina littorea structures rocky intertidal communities through strong grazing pressure and is frequently parasitized by the digenean trematode Cryptocotyle lingua. We hypothesized that the effects of parasitism on host physiology would induce behavioral changes in L. littorea, which in turn would modulate L. littorea's influence on intertidal community composition.

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: behavior modification ecosystem functioning herbivory intertidal zone trait-mediated indirect interactions