“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.”
From The Independent comes the news that AIDS is primarily a disease that afflicts people who live risky life styles.
“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.”
I remember when anyone who dared utter a thought like this was both homophobic and racist. Reading the entire article, which you should do, it strikes me that a lot of money has been misspent trying to educate the world about a crisis that never existed. If you don’t engage in the risky behaviors described in the article, you don’t have much risk of becoming infected.
Malaria and other insect borne diseases in Africa seem to be a far greater public health threat. National Geographic has an interesting article about this.
This is not to say that HIV/AIDS is not a serious problem for the people who have it, however it seems that it’s far easier to prevent that Malaria. If people stopped engaging in risky behavior which has been identified for almost twenty years, then the spread of HIV/AIDS would slow. You can’t say the same for Malaria because it doesn’t seem that the Mosquitoes that spread it will listen to pleas that they stop biting children or adults.
A person more suspicious than I am might think that someone made a strategic decision to scare the heterosexual, not at risk, populace in order to bolster awareness and funding for HIV/AIDS research. Not that anyone would ever pervert science to promote a political agenda unless they were evil Republicans or something. Unless it’s for people’s own good, like using iffy science about Global Climate Change to scare people into believing it’s settled science.
Yes Mr. Pamola, once again my mind is just not right. I’ve decided that Rightmindness is a journey, not a destination.
The Diplomad has a very similar post over at his blog. He has some different insights, but I too urge my readers not to grab the low hanging fruit by making easy, juvenile, jokes about the man’s name.
Great article. Reminds me of the stories about the ‘science’ of Phrenology, the study of the interrelation between bumps on the head and political/social leanings of the heads’ owner. Louis Pasteur was shunned for not believing in it, in fact. Good thing, too. Without all that free time, he wouldn’t have begin looking into microbiology.
I think that Phrenology might have a better scientific basis than either this AIDS thing or Global Warming.
It doesn’t surprise me that people have been duped into a lot of goofy-ass beliefs; look at how many people still believe in astrology.
I’ve heard from a friend who lives in San Francisco that health workers there who treat HIV/AIDS patients are either afraid or prevented from widely reporting what they observe: that the vast, vast majority of the patients they treat are gay men engaging in unprotected, multiple-partner intercourse and other known high-risk behaviors, and that often times these people take the risks *knowingly*, including having intercourse with people they *know* are HIV-positive. My friend reports that these behaviors are integral to some parts of the gay culture in San Francisco, and that *that* is the sacred cow no one will attack. No one wants to be the one to say “You have a culture that is harmful to your health; I suggest you challenge it, change it, or leave it.” Here in the Bay Area, that’s a recipe for being called homophobic, bigoted, fascist, the whole rigmarole. I’m sure they’d find a way to throw ‘racist’ in there too.Meanwhile, the doctors’ offices are overburdened an increasing number of new HIV patients, and no one is reporting it. But the annual AIDS marathon gets plenty of publicity.That said, all but the last sentence is second-hand, and I’d be happy to hear the views of anyone with relevant first-hand health care experience on this.