If it's Tuesday ...

... it must be Kinky NIH Foreign Sex Research Abstract Day at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network!

Fox seems to have picked up its game a bit since our last visit. The lurid junior-high bits are almost gone, and the reporter (named) has gone out and found some "taxpayer watchdogs" (or "government watchdogs," he doesn't seem quite sure which) to "cry foul" on cue. Well, actually, he's found one watchdog; that's the Fox Plural there, creating a movement from a single source. And. to be fair, we stick fairly close to an actual public policy issue: should we spend tax money on Them Foreigners?

Oddly, Fox more or less gives that point away:

While some active NIH projects -- such as studies of suicide patterns among young men and women in China -- have a clearer relevance for communities living in the U.S., the utility of this study for U.S. citizens is not as clear-cut.

Well, that'll save a few hundred thousand right there. We can outsource all that messy peer review to Fox News.

The abstract indicates that it is intended to create prevention models specifically tailored to the "sociocultural factors specific to female and kathoey sex workers" in Thailand.

Yes. And it concludes: "Internationally, studies are needed on how to translate and adapt interventions that have proven to be effective in the U.S. to other communities and international settings, and to learn from other conditions and cultures to inform our understanding of the causes, consequences, and differences in HIV-related risks, morbidity, and mortality in diverse populations." It'd be nice if the researchers themselves took a whack at explaining the relevance, but they don't seem to have returned Fox's phone calls. Can't say I'm shocked at that.

I expect we'll see a few more of these, but they might just fade away as Fox realizes that they aren't really that interesting.