When you think of pastors giving people bad advice about AIDS, you think of Catholics in Africa. When you think of pastors telling patients that God, and not Western medicine, can heal them, you think of either Christian Scientists or wacko American fundamentalists.

But some Pentecostal preachers are advising their AIDS-afflicted patients to give up their antivirals—in England!

Since this “survey” is anecdotal, I’ll give just a brief summary of the BBC’s recent report:

The Children’s HIV Association surveyed 19 doctors and health professionals working with babies and children in England; its members had reported hearing anecdotal evidence of HIV patients deciding to stop taking their anti-retroviral drugs because their pastors had told them to do so.

Among 10 doctors who said they had encountered the problem in the last five years, 29 of their patients had reported being put under pressure to stop taking medicine and at least 11 had done so.

The doctors and health professionals reported a variety of cases:

. . . The healthcare workers also reported that some patients had been told by their pastors they would be healed by prayer or by drinking blessed water.

Why give up the drugs? Apparently because it gives God a chance to effect the cure.

Pentecostals and other Christians see healing, like speaking in tongues, as a sign of the presence of God.

Pentecostal pastor Stevo Atanasio, from the East London Christian Church, said that among his congregation, blind people had recovered sight, deaf people had heard again, and what were considered terminal illnesses had been cured.

And the amputees?

“We don’t say to people ‘don’t take your medication don’t go to the doctor’. I mean we never say that,” he said.

“But we believe that the first healing comes from inside, it’s a spiritual healing. Some people are hurt, they have broken hearts. If you are healed from inside, then you are healed from outside as well.”

So far I know of no evidence that spirituality can kill viruses.

Now this is only a small number of cases, but remember that one life lost over such stupidity is one life too many, especially when it’s a young child. Truly, telling your flock to give up AIDS drugs should be a criminal offense.

The BBC reports that Pentecostalism is growing quickly in the UK: The number of Pentecostal churches in London, for example, has doubled since 2005.

What’s going on over there? Are Brits reverting to the religious lunacy of the U.S.?

h/t: Steve

by Matthew Cobb

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any communication system can be hijacked and exploited by an external party. I came across this great example from 2009, published on Alex Wild’s old blog PhotoSynthesis, which includes the weirdest antennae I have ever seen in an adult fly.

Many ants (and other social insects) will feed each other by a process known as trophallaxis. Typically, one individual will come up to another, touch antennae – presumably involving an exchange of chemical signals, but vibration may also be involved – and the ant with food will then give up some of its precious booty to its sister. Here’s one of Alex’s pictures of two Crematogaster ants doing this in KwaZulu-Natal, in eastern South Africa:

Alex noticed that the trail of ants going up an Acacia tree was being buzzed by some small grey flies. His photos revealed what as going on. The flies – which turn out to be a species called Milichia patrizii – were hacking the ants’ communication system and stealing food – ‘kleptoparasitism’. The flies would grab the antennae of the ant, and then stick their proboscis into the ant’s mouth, whereupon the ant would give its food up. All the fly has to do is hang around and get some free grub (sorry).

Here’s a great pic. See if you can see *how* the fly is grabbing its victim’s  antennae:

Look closely – the fly is holding the ant’s antenna in between its own antennae! Alex writes:

The fly triggers an automatic regurgitation response by tapping the ant’s palps with her proboscis. Oddly enough, once the ant has acquiesced the fly releases her victim’s antenna and the ant just sits there. There may be a chemical communication going on between the tip of the ants antennae and the concave upper lip of the fly, but we don’t know. Might be a project of interest to a South African student. If any are reading this. Hint, hint, hint.

The ability to Milichia patrizii flies move their antennae in this way is unique, it appears. It would be interesting to know if related species show similar moveable appendages, or if M. patrizii has evolved them at the same time as it began to hack the ants’ communication system.

Although, like Alex, I would bet on there being an unseen chemical element to this behaviour,  it’s possible that their ‘hack’ isn’t quite so complex. Some ants will grab hold of each other’s antennae in dominance struggles. The ant may simply be feeling subdued, and will then give up its food in a reflex action, not because it has been totally duped into ‘thinking’ it’s feeding a sister. Separating these hypotheses would be difficult, I suspect, but an initial test would be to immobilise a Crematogaster ant, and then tickle its mouthparts and see whether it gives up its food. That would indicate that food release did not require chemical camouflage on the part of the thief.

Milichia patrizii was first described in 1952 by Willi Hennig, the Swiss biologist who developed the use of what is known as cladistics to study relationships between organisms. He was also a great maggot man. But he didn’t see M. patrizii in the wild, and no one knew of this behaviour until Alex noticed it, and called it the ‘ant-mugging fly’ on his blog (a common name which has now been taken up by the Natural History Museum in London), although this is not particularly violent ‘mugging’.

Hennig studied a preserved, dead specimen, on which the antennae do not look particularly unusual, and certainly not as though they could grab anything.

Alex published an article about his discovery with Irina Brake in African Invertebrates, but I haven’t been able to read it as that particular issue is not on line at the moment. For more details, you should read Alex’s original post.

The observant among you may have noticed that I referred to the weirdest antennae I have seen on an adult fly. Michael Skvarla on Twitter pointed out that phantom midge larvae, which live in the water, have antennae that can grab, too, but it a particularly predatorial fashion. Here’s a picture from vernalpool.org (the silver blobs are air bubbles that the beast uses as it moves up and down in the water):

Do any readers know of any other antennae in flies that are used in weird ways?

Live action photos © Alex Wild. Dead fly photo (C) NHM. Midge larva – it says.

H/t to the Twitter folk who were tweeting about various raptorial appendages in flies (raptorial mid-tarsae? amazing)  in the wee small hours of Sunday morning and gave me the links and the inspiration: @BioInFocus @dllavaneras @phil_torres @MSkvarla36 @flygirlNHM @BrytheFlyGuy