From the leftwing Independent in Britain, we see the admission from the World Health Organization that the Great and the Good have been, well, lying to us about AIDS for a quarter of a century:
Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits
A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts
By Jeremy Laurance
A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.
In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.
Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients. …
In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which provides 20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was infected, mainly through injecting drug use, the same level of infection as in South Africa in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since risen to 25 per cent.
Dr De Cock said: "I think it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread." …
Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.
Dr De Cock labelled these the "four malignant arguments" undermining support for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond Africa.
Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a weapon to stigmatise high risk groups, he said. …
Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being spent educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far bigger impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing on interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk of infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.
There were "elements of truth" in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. "You will not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You need to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have not always been good at that."…
One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had sex with men. He said: " We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men is not declining and in some places has increased. …
The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa – with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country – but nowhere else.
"It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships."
"Sexual behaviour is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection." ….
But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.
"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"
How do you explain such differences between North Dakota and Washington DC? It's a conundrum, a quandary, a puzzlement. Dr. Cock and the rest of the worlds' AIDS experts are stumped, apparently, and if they can't figure it out, with all their lavish research funding, then nobody could ever possibly puzzle it out. Some things we are just meant never to understand.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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58 comments:
I remember reading all the HIV hysteria [in e.g. the NY Times] in the 1980's [which was back when I used to read the NY Times], and assuming it was all true.
But then along came Michael Fumento to set the record straight - I particularly remember a statistic from one of his stories which indicated that the CDC was not sure if ANY man had ever contracted HIV from a woman via normal "missionary style" intercourse.
[BTW, Fumento also came out with a series of articles ridiculing the H5N1 hysteria - let's hope he's right on that one, as well.]
Anyway, the "crisis" of heterosexual HIV was my first experience of being misled by the MSM - my first [and hopefully last] experience of being duped by leftist propaganda & disinformation.
I guess it's a good thing, though - once you understand how P&D works, then you don't even have to listen to the arguments anymore - all you have to do is hear the tone of voice of the people doing the shrieking to know that what they're peddling is necessarily factually false [cf global warming hysteria as we move into what appears to be a new mini-Ice Age] and that you don't even have to waste any time researching the matter to be entirely confident that the facts are indeed otherwise.
Congratulations Steve, you made it through the entire article without once commenting on the good doctor's name. That must have taken some major league self-restraint.
I remember back when the disease was new back in the early 80's. It was my impression that some of the gays I spoke to at the time just couldn't wait for it to spread to the hetero population. Sorry to disappoint you, fellas.
Step 1) Spread misinformation about true risk of HIV
Step 2) Marginalize anyone who questions misinformation
Step 3) Profit!
I realize this puts me in "official crackpot" land, but I just don't buy the whole "AIDS in Africa" thing - how can a disease be so different from continent to continent? It seems much more likely that governments and NGOs would vatly inflate the numbers, calling anything more than the sniffles AIDS, since that's how you get first worlders to send money. But then again I don't know anything about it, so I could be wrong...
*****How do you explain such differences between North Dakota and Washington DC? It's a conundrum, a quandary, a puzzlement. Dr. Cock and the rest of the worlds' AIDS experts are stumped, apparently, and if they can't figure it out, with all their lavish research funding, then nobody could ever possibly puzzle it out. Some things we are just meant to never understand.*****
Sometimes good honest deadpan sarcasm is funnier than any other form of humor.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that to see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
If this isn't a textbook example, I don't know what is.
Well before we all start attacking liberals for being too cautious about HIV, keep in mind that it was conservative hero Ronald Reagan who didn't force a school to admit an HIV positive boy back in the 1980's. There was cautiousness on both sides. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The truth is not enough was known about HIV, and it was worth it to encourage the public to be excessively cautious, including straight people engaging in casual sex.
inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.
See, you righties don't get off completely.
Apparently in Africa they have an 'ABC'-Abstain, Be Faithful, use Condoms campaign which has a series of cascading suggestions I liken to an if-then-else statement.
Don't mess around, but if you can't do that, stick to one person, but if you can't even pull that off...
So here's a somewhat-related question - Did Magic Johnson getting HIV make things better or worse overall? Was is it just a big distraction or was there a net benefit from the increased "awareness"?
Steve, I'll be the first to admit that you're a clever gent, but I'm curious as to how it is, exactly, that you'd phrase what it is the WHO won't say (or hasn't realized). If I HAD to phrase it myself, it would take me like four days of editing to get it right. I mean, you have to admit it's a tough thing to get across while minimizing (eliminating? not likely!) the hair-tearing and belly-aching that will ensue.
But if you want to take a pass on this one, I completely understand.
In other words: the HIV virus have been decocked...
"I seem to remember reading somewhere that to see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
You might have read it here http://www.isteve.com/ (see top left corner)
To be fair I don't see this as a typical leftist myth, hetrosex. AIDS doesn't have strong leftist policy-implications. It seems to be more of a general public opinion myth.
"how can a disease be so different from continent to continent?" - jimbo
My guess is that the rate of transmission from any given encounter is rather low, but still varies quite a bit depending on what happens in the encounter. How much a disease spreads can depend a lot on how many "typhoid Marys" there are ... just a few can do a lot of spreading.
A single "big man" with a lot of partners, who prefers the sort of acts that cause a lot of bleeding (rough sex, dry sex, sex with physically smaller women) and who chooses more easily-infect partners (women who have been infibulated, women already infected with syphillis, etc.), can infected tons of people. Each of them will have a smaller chance of infecting a male, and a commensurately smaller chance of creating a new big man Typhoid Mary. Small alterations in these small chances create a potential for huge changes in overall infection rates.
One of the reasons the left misses the boat on this one, is that they are obsessed with hypocritical acts whether or not they are frequent, and ignore destructive acts if they aren't hypocritical. So when a male from a monogamous culture contracts HIV from a prostitute/girlfriend and infects his wife, it is much bigger news than when a male from a polygamous culture drives his truck all over Africa infecting girls in a dozen different countries.
With no absolute morality, there can't be absolute immorality. So the left has to focus on relative immorality, i.e. hypocrisy. Anything goes as long as you're not ashamed of it and don't try to deny it. (You may even become the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.)
"AIDS is a political disease."
Or so said a family member who is an MD.
It primarily attacks, in the words of John Derbyshire, a DVG or Designated Victim Group.
But left unsaid is all the funds that are mis-directed towards curing it (are you listening Andrew Sullivan?) could be better spent on other diseases.
Michael Fumento has questioned whether heterosexually-spread AIDS is even that prevalent in Africa (there are other ways that HIV may be spread, and some "AIDS" cases might not really be AIDS).
Dr. de Cock also vouchsafes this insight: "It is astonishing how badly we have done with men who have sex with men. It is something that is going to have to be discussed much more rigorously." Ya think?
Apropos anonymous's comment that "AIDS doesn't have strong leftist policy implications", I recommend a return to Fumento's book. The myth of heterosexual AIDS was invented by homosexual activists in order to secure support for public funds that they believed, perhaps correctly, would not have been forthcoming if the disease had been seen as just a gay plague. The myth was thus a deliberate political construct and a very successful one, at least so far as funding was concerned.
Dr. de Cock's comment, quoted above, suggests that the myth may have been counterproductive in other respects.
*****"I seem to remember reading somewhere that to see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
You might have read it here http://www.isteve.com/ (see top left corner)*****
Oh, is THAT where I read it? Knock me over with a feather!
*****To be fair I don't see this as a typical leftist myth, hetrosex. AIDS doesn't have strong leftist policy-implications.*****
No? As someone else has pointed out, it is still a disease that almost exclusively strikes designated victim groups and hardly anyone else.
Finding a cure for AIDs has become a "civil rights issue" and I know of no other ailment of which this is true, not even sickle-cell anemia.
SFG -- one's partner particularly in Africa may be infected and not know it. Might lie too about prior/concurrent encounters.
So condom use is not a cascading if/then statement but rather multiple defenses against HIV.
Somewhat related, AP reports 1 in 4 adult NYC dwellers have genital herpes. Sex and the City's revenge!
Story/link Here
The rate among sexually active adults must be sky high since the sample population includes "adults" including seniors having no/little sex.
I wonder if/when the frequency or absolute number of one's partners (or various indicators of same) will start becoming sexual selection factors?
If the perceived risk of genital herpes let alone AIDS is high, from the playboy types and "Samantha" types, won't that skew mating strategies significantly?
Dr. de Cock? Surely you jest.
"(there are other ways that HIV may be spread, and some "AIDS" cases might not really be AIDS)."
Yes, WHO disease vaccinations.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/
july2004/070104aidsconspiracy.htm
blode wrote:
With no absolute morality, there can't be absolute immorality. So the left has to focus on relative immorality,
Leftists are not moral relativists. When it comes to dogmatic moralising, leftists take the cake. That's hypocricy. Leftists like to denounce creationism, but when the question of human population differences comes up, leftists use unmistakably creationist arguments to defend the supposed impossibility of analysing that particular question. That's hypocricy.
Leftists like to present themselves as things they are not, in order to conceal what they really are.. They also attack easy targets (like christian fundamentalists) as a means of buttressing their false self-portrayals.
I don't consider lefists declaring themsleves to be moral relativists, scientific, against creationism, etc. to be essentially different to barbarians crudely aping the manners and speech of civilised people.
I consider myself something of a moral relativist. In truth I don't know exactly what it means so I can't be too dogmatic about being a moral relativist, but for one thing I don't believe in free will and I accept that genetics plays a big roll in behaviour. I consider that (consistent with natural selection) that impersonal forces rule the universe and that even impersonal forces rule over supposed moral choices, and when it comes to answering the question of how I should (or will) conduct myself I often find that I don't have definite answers. When someone hits you some say turn the other cheek, but isn't that passive aggression? Wouldn't the certain knowledge of non-retaliation put a spring in the step of sociopaths? Likewise if I promise rettaliation maybe I would just be perpetuating a needless cycle of revenge and misery. See what I mean. I sit here seeing the big moral questions as hard to answer and I believe that simple dogmatisms may not be really be the best answers. My final point is that I consider this thinking to be totally consistent with conservatism. Convervatism always took the tragic view of man, was never triumphalistic, messianistic, or even prone to dogmatic moralisation.
Heck I'm not even done. The thing is is that I'm fearful that my philosophy, although it may make me happy, does not make me happy to the extent it is proving unable defend its own territory in the Darwinian game. Philosophies and religions of middle eastern provenance are proving more vigorous and virile. The stoics (whom I admire) were obliterated by Christianity, and Christianity is losing to Marxism and Islam.
wait till they admit that most of what they call "AIDS" in africa is the same diseases they have seen in Africa for decades, combined with low T-cell counts. that is the definition. eg, nothing unusual. the whole disease is just political correctness gone wild to avoid blaming people in industrial societies for terrible lifestyle choices.
Two good books those of you with an interest in AIDS might enjoy: Gabriel Rotello's "Sexual Ecology" and Richard Berkowitz' "Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex." Both are remarkably straight-shooting, so to speak.
Take away lesson from "Sexual Ecology": AIDS isn't easily spread, it requires really, really extraordinary circumstances to flourish.
Takeaway lesson from "Stayin' Alvie": the "gay community" invented and promoted safe sex (as well as the hysteria about AIDS crssing over into other populations) as a political move. Basically gays wanted to figure out a way to continue being promiscuous -- they saw promiscuity as a civil right that they'd fought hard for. Thus the huge emphasis on everyone wearing condoms.
Well, the obvious solution is to drag the AIDS virus before an international court and charge it with genocide. We simply cannot tolerate it's vicious singling out of homosexual men, prostitutes, and slutty sub-saharan africans. Three groups which have been demonized and victimized throughout history.
There's nothing wrong with having sex with anyone and everyone you see fit, and if AIDS disagrees, then AIDS is a bigot.
Two quick anecdotes that might be relevent:
#1: I have a Ph.D. in microbiology and I work for a medical testing company. We recently had a speaker who works on HIV prevention for the CDC. I asked him why the breakdown of AIDS in Europe and the US among men is 2/3 homosexuals and 1/3 IV drug users whereas in Africa almost all the men have contracted HIV through heterosexual activity. His reply was "we're different" (meaning the US) and then made a reference to more migrant workers in Africa--considering the unemployment rate I would guess there are more "migrant workers", or workers who travel often, in the US proportionally. He clearly didn't want to answer the question.
#2: When I was in high school (15-18 years ago) they brought in an HIV+ guy to basically scare us into having safe sex. This guy was obviously gay and told us as much. However, he told us that based on when his symptoms started and when they thought he acquired HIV before he "came out" and must have gotten it from a girl. He was clearly lying.
Just a couple examples of the disinformation we've been fed for decades about this disease. My opinion is that HIV disinformation is part and parcel of the left-wing attempt to completely uncouple morality from sexual behavior so as to hasten the dissolution of the nuclear family. The point of this endeavor is to replace the family with a radical extension of state power and also to normalize "abnormal" practices.
Michael Fumento has questioned whether heterosexually-spread AIDS is even that prevalent in Africa (there are other ways that HIV may be spread, and some "AIDS" cases might not really be AIDS).
The spread of HIV in the US black community is often attributed to "prison culture": black men engage in homosexual sex while in prison, and then later, after they have been released, have sex with unsuspecting female partners. This is an example of what Steve calls the black blank slate theory, which states that there is no connection between African American culture and African culture, African Americans having emerged tabula rasa on the American continent in the 17th century. Not likely. Fumento's explanation makes a lot of sense.
"including straight people engaging in casual sex"
Very few straight women engage in casual sex though. The main routes of HIV/AIDS transmission into the heterosexual population are:
1.) Injecting drugs with needles
2.) Bisexual men that are on the "down low"
3.) Men that have sex with prostitutes
Uh... this will be unpleasant, but the reason AIDS proliferates in Africa is due to a few facts that are not very politically correct, but nevertheless are facts.
First, rape is a fact of life in many parts of Africa, owing to culture of male dominance, and lax prosecution.
Second is the dismissal of all warnings relating to the consuming of "jungle meat," aka chimps, which serve as a virtual lab for new taxa of AIDS viruses.
Finally, there is the cultural adherence to what could be referred to as "dry sex."
In many parts of africa, sex without lubrication is a major preference either vaginally or anally, and many of it's practitioners will go so far as to introduce dirt or sand into those areas prior to copulation to enhance the effect.
This practice almost guarantee's the major prerequisite for the transfer of the AIDS virus, which is one significant pool of blood comingling with another.
The penis, the vagina, and the buttocks, combined with the other factors all provide the necessary components to successfully transfer the AIDS virus.
Again, these people have been warned repeatedly against rape, using sand for sex, and eating chimps. They have rejected all three suggested adjustments to undermine the proliferation of the AIDs virus, so they continue to lead the world in AIDs related deaths.
As long as they do, AIDs will continue to rock and roll in Africa, and new strains that will be untraceable through current methods will continue to travel about the world in general, and our multiculture-enamored country in particular.
Bushmeat seems to continue to be a problem especially in the Congo, since it includes not only chimps, but also pygmies, women, and members of foreign clans.
I'd imagine the cannibalism is harder to quantify since it's more difficult to find remains in a form that are particularly identifiable, but the apparent assuredness of the "cooks" in charge seem to support the notion that it has become more of a habit, and less of what we would presume to be a random act of insanity.
Find below a small sampling from qualified sources:
http://www.monuc.org/News.aspx?newsID=432
http://www.monuc.org/News.aspx?newsId=15078
http://www.monuc.org/News.aspx?newsId=15065
http://www.monuc.org/News.aspx?newsId=17481
Testing said:
"I wonder if/when the frequency or absolute number of one's partners (or various indicators of same) will start becoming sexual selection factors?"
I don't know if it was Steve who said it, or if I read it elsewhere, that men and women seem to like parity. For example, a woman who has slept around will feel bad about her history and self if she's with a virginal, or virgin man. Speaking of the selection forces of STD's, but they can affect the organs thus harming fertility and even the unborn and babies as they are being birthed though modern medicine has helped this some.
Glaivester said...
Michael Fumento has questioned whether heterosexually-spread AIDS is even that prevalent in Africa (there are other ways that HIV may be spread, and some "AIDS" cases might not really be AIDS).
Yo! Glaivester
You're not gonna get/keep a cushy AIDS job in the Medical-Industrial Complex with that attitude. It's all about the money, honey.
In all fairness, encouraging abstinence, faithfulness, and less spontaneous/enjoyable casual sex, hardly destroys families or hurts the conservative cause. Likewise, the research into vaccines, retroviruses and the immune system, and the improved biochemical technology that research has funded, carry over into other disease research. So while I personally blame the AIDs furor for not getting more action in High School, I think overall it has helped more than hurt.
Quote: "the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"
I'm beginning to wonder if the frequency with which we see this rhetorical question--"Can anyone see the connection? Anyone?"--is a coded device by which that which is obvious, but which must not be acknowledged, can be pointed out in the hope that some critical mass will eventually be reached at which point the obvious can be acknowledged. The writer is saying, "Look at the emperor--what is it about his clothes? There's something . . . can anyone tell me what it is about the emperor's clothes that maybe I'm not getting? Help me out here, people!"
>How do you explain such differences?<
leftists literally won't recognize the truth even when it hits them over the head in the form of a 2x4 a mugger's fist a steel pipe or shrapnel from a grenade.
because what value can the truth have when the only legitimate value is the party line? for the committed leftist the truth is an obstacle and always an obstacle.
I realize this puts me in "official crackpot" land, but I just don't buy the whole "AIDS in Africa" thing....
(1) AIDS is defined differently in Africa so that a number of diseases historically common in poor parts of the continent count as AIDS, (2) people with those diseases are classified as having AIDS even if they are never tested for HIV, and (3) even among the small percentage tested, the results are unreliable because of the high percentage of false positives.
"They are probably lying about smoking, period."
About passive smoking, very possibly; about active smoking, no. The evidence against cigarette smoking has accumulated to be as good as you can get, short of doing controlled experiments on humans.
The status of AIDS as the trendy disease with a sexy angle has been diminishing for a while now. The reigning champion in that category is breast cancer, with pink-packaged products throughout Wal-Mart that you can buy to show your support for women and their breasts.
I am sorry but I dont get it. Maybe I dont understand the codewords. Please explain the quandary for dumbs. Is AIDS a disease attacking mostly African people? It is because some sexual habit exclusive to Africans? Why are North Dakotans immune to AIDS? Europeans have something that Africans dont or what is happening? I understand you are pointing to something racial, what it is? Are Africans too stupid to protect themselves from AIDS? Why should be so difficult to say it? Somebody is forbidding it? If it is true, and if it will help people, what is the problem? Am I being naive or you are just making a quandary where there is no need to create any?
Perhaps it is because so many more whites are naturally immune to AIDS?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/highlights/011025_ccr5.shtml
(which of course fuels the conspiracy theorist everywhere)
I don't agree that pouring so much money into retrovirus research benefits us all that much in the end.
We are not going to find a "cure" for the HIV retrovirus in our lifetime.
Stop and consider how long scientists have been trying to defeat the common cold. Whoever does would an instant billionaire. That's plenty of motivation, but still... nobody has. Nobody will in our lifetime. They can only figure out how to do end runs around it. No cure.
Our billions would be MUCH better spent researching Alzheimer's, since that disease will, by any responsible researcher's estimate, rock the economy of the United States far more in comparison, and as baby boomers start hitting their seventies, it's going to change the way this country functions dramatically.
The popular media has been giving Alzheimer's short shrift in relation to how it will change everyone's lives in the near future.
When it really hits, nobody will be talking about AIDS.
It will be the major topic of the new century: essentially "dawn of the dead" without the cannibalism.
I used to work with a Nigerian immigrant. It was his opinion that AIDS was some sort of nefarious plot on the part of apartheid era government of South Africa. He basically said, "Isn't it a coincidence that AIDS took off once apartheid ended?"
Apparently AIDS was a stealth bomb left by the Afrikaners.
He overlooked the fact that long haul truckers were, as the airline commercial says, free to move about the country once apartheid ended. They became the new vectors.
Hey jimbo
Casual sex is the norm in SubSa Africa. Village elders initiate the young girls. Apart from that they only talk crap and smoke pot, whilst their infected wives till the fields. Its a culture thing.
You could have known all you wanted about blacks in SubSa Africa by asking those racist Rhodesians or white South Africans, but it was not cool to believe them so everybody still asks these dumb questions now when things could ALWAYS have been clear. I guess we can afford to be ignorant.
What every body seems to overlook in discussions of AIDS is that unlike any typical parasitic or bacterial infection/infestation you do not die of AIDS per se. You die of its effect on your ability to resist infections/infestations.
If you have been subject to the depredations of HIV. You will die of some "opportunistic" infection (bacterial, viral, or parasitic). You will not die directly from HIV.
So if someone dies of malaria for example in the United States and has tested positive for HIV then that person is said to have died of AIDS. This is a resonable decision. But in Africa where there are many, many different infections they seldom test for HIV. They simple attribute viral and bacterial infections to a presumed underlying HIV infection.
Some critics say that in the past when someone died of malaria they wrote malaria on the death certificate but today for exactly the same symptoms they write AIDS. Nobody has ever seemed to care if Africans died of tropical diseases but an AIDS diagnosis can lead to help from the West.
I'm fairly sure that HIV rates in Africa are calculated from sentinel studies in health clinics using the same tests used here in the West. They aren't just diagnosing sick people with AIDS to get funding.
Lack of circumcision among men plus a tradition of concurrent sexual partners explains much of the high HIV rates in Africa, which, nonentheless, are far from universal. I think the use of non-sterile needles in African hospitals may be a contributing and underappreciated factor.
Even so, some sub-Saharan countries do not have severe epidemics, and most likely will not develop such at this point.
(1) AIDS is defined differently in Africa so that a number of diseases historically common in poor parts of the continent count as AIDS, (2) people with those diseases are classified as having AIDS even if they are never tested for HIV, and (3) even among the small percentage tested, the results are unreliable because of the high percentage of false positives.
I've heard such things, but it conflicts with the universal tendency of individuals with AIDS-like symptoms, prefering to believe that they do not have HIV, until they are forced to believe it on account of a positive test. In accordance with this pattern, president Mbeki of South Africa used to insist that AIDS wasn't caused by HIV. I assume that this denial arises because HIV transmission is associated with male homosexuality and unrestrained sexual impulsivity. In truth I don't feel certain about what's going on in Africa, but I tentatively believe the AIDS alarmists.
But then along came Michael Fumento to set the record straight - I particularly remember a statistic from one of his stories which indicated that the CDC was not sure if ANY man had ever contracted HIV from a woman via normal "missionary style" intercourse.
I don't see what's to stop HIV transmission when enabling pathologies are present. When I think about this, it occurs to me that this may be why circumcision is a risk mitigator, if we consider that circumcision reduces the fequency of ordinary infection with consequent open sores.
The Fumento article that Glaivester links to above includes this passage:
"German anthropologist Kurt Falk reported in the 1920s that bisexuality was almost universal among the male populations of African tribes he studied. Medical records also show that African men who insist they're straighter than the proverbial arrow often suffer transmissible anorectal diseases."
I wonder if the African-American "down-low" subculture could turn out to have roots in Africa?
Yes,dammit,why IS Africa so distinct? Isnt it common in all parts of the world for a guy who has AIDS to have intercourse with an infant to magically cure himself? I mena,thats pretty standard stuff,aint it? :*
marc mentioned, "Lack of circumcision among men".
This may distinguish Africa from the United States, but if I'm not mistaken it doesn't distinguish Africa from Europe or Asia. I'm highly inclined to doubt circumcision angle.
(Which is to say nothing of the various mutiliations of females sometimes referred to as "circumcision", which increase infection rates for all sorts of diseases, as well as having the potential to make blodes on other continents red-faced with anger.)
j., the answer to your question could be long or short. The short answer is, "AIDS spreads through Africa differnently because Africans are different." Who knows how different?
People have mentioned anal sex, dry sex, sex with underage victims, rape, and frequency of sex partners. There's also the basic health of the population to consider ... people with open sores are more likely to catch it.
Let's pause for a moment at the underage/nonconsensual angle some have alluded to. Check out Wikipedia on a new and different practice that makes me pretty angry. The point isn't that it causes AIDS; the point is that it is done because mothers in that country feel that they have no power to prevent their daughters from being raped. They feel they must make them less attractive to the perps! Don't trust La Wik, read the links.
So while in East Africa, female genitals are mutilated to make a girl a good catch for a husband, in West Africa, breasts are attacked in the hopes that the rapists will pick someone else. ... And we're to believe that "People are the same wherever you go"?
What about South Africa, where a cabinet member carefully took a shower after raping an HIV+ woman ... to keep from catching the disease?
Swing over to the United States, where there is a massive incidence of black-on-white rape (supported, often explicitly, by leftist heroes), a high HIV rate among black men, a high incidence of catching AIDS from violent sex
... and a by-any-means-necessary / kill whitey mentality pervading a criminal underclass
... abetted by white Uncle Toms who think a rope hanging from a tree is about equal in magnitude to six athletes beating stomping on a kid's face.
I'm a only a white nationalist when I think about these things. Rest of the time I'm really normal, honest.
Dr. Peter H. Duesberg's position is that "American/European AIDS diseases are brought on by the long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or AZT."
He also states "THE LONG LIST OF AFRICAN AIDS DISEASES CAN NOT BE CLINICALLY DISTINGUISHED FROM THEIR CONVENTIONAL COUNTERPARTS."
The above quotes from Dr. Duesberg's website. duesberg.com
He is a virologist who "isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970."
Kent Gatewood
First, AIDS is a collection of specific symptoms and infections not a disease in itself.
If you are HIV+ and have TB, you are considerd an AIDS patient.
If you have TB and are HIV-, you are NOT an AIDS patient.
Is there a proven causality between HIV and AIDS?
Apparently not.
See Kary Mullis: http://www.duesberg.com/viewpoints/kintro.html
Here's another commentary on the report, from a site that questions the HIV/AIDS link (as does Duesberg, cited above.) The same site has some other recent entries on the apparent "racism" of the HIV virus.
http://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/
As with so many other things, I haven't studied the claims (made by some) denying a causal linkage between HIV and AIDS. For the time being I consider AIDS denialism to be crackpottery, and I haven't heard of any hiv-negative AIDS denialists (like President Mbeki of South Africa or Duesberg) putting their money where their mouths are and injecting themselves with the HIV virus, but then again some AIDS denialists deny that the HIV virus even exists. Wikipedia has an unsympathetic page on the subject. with the following ironic section:
Death of HIV-positive [AIDS] denialists
In 2007, aidstruth.org, a website run by HIV researchers to counter denialist claims, published a partial list of AIDS denialists who had died of apparently AIDS-related causes. For example, the magazine Continuum, run by HIV-positive denialists, shut down when its editors all died of AIDS-related causes. It was noted that in every case, the AIDS denialist community has attributed the deaths to unknown causes, secret drug use, or stress. Similarly, several HIV-positive former dissidents have reported being ostracized by the AIDS-denialist community after they developed AIDS and decided to pursue effective antiretroviral treatment.
roger chaillet,
The guy doing germ warfare in Apartheid South Africa was Dr. Germ, a medical officer. He was so good that even Mandela asked him to continue working for the "new" army, but I'm sure he could not match the US, Russia or Israel in things germ warfare. So if they could not create Aids, South Africa was not up to it. But I like that respect the nigerian had for Afrikaners. Its a good thing blacks admit that we were more competent than them. That way we know they killed Apartheid because they were jealous of our achievements and not because it was evil, like say Mugabe.
dissidentman,
You really haven't proven anything with your cut-and-paste. There is no question that those folks had their immune systems wrecked beyond the point of no return. That's why the cold that you shook off in a couple of days when you were 30 will set the stage for pneumococcal infection that kills you when you're 80. The question is whether a specific virus is causing AIDS, and gosh darn it all, that pesky HIV is a virus that refuses to act like a virus. In fact, I think it still hasn't been isolated but I'm open to correction.
--Senor Doug.
For a skeptical take on the HIV-circumcision connection, see John Hawks
DissidentMan: I don't see what's to stop HIV transmission when enabling pathologies are present. When I think about this, it occurs to me that this may be why circumcision is a risk mitigator, if we consider that circumcision reduces the fequency of ordinary infection with consequent open sores.
Yes, but in "normal missionary style" intercourse, there aren't any "enabling pathologies".
There aren't syphilis & herpes sores, there aren't dirty needles, there isn't any bleeding.
And, quite frankly, circumcision is [or used to be] the standard for American men - it is [or used to be] "normal".
Someone asked: "I wonder if the African-American 'down-low' subculture could turn out to have roots in Africa?"
Yes, that's it exactly. I've often thought a better term than "homosexual" would be "hypersexual." If a man can get past the initial disgust at sex with another man, he can have as much sex as he likes. Unlike women, who are inclined to say "no," there's no shortage of men willing to say "yes."
Someone asked: "I wonder if the African-American 'down-low' subculture could turn out to have roots in Africa?"
Yes, that's it exactly. I've often thought a better term than "homosexual" would be "hypersexual." If a man can get past the initial disgust at sex with another man, he can have as much sex as he likes. Unlike women, who are inclined to say "no," there's no shortage of men willing to say "yes."
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