Asymmetrical Information

Year and years ago, the NYTImes had a piece on sexual customs in Africa--inluding the insertion of stones into the vagina to provide more fricition. But, they also make tiny abrasions which increase the chance of infection. Never saw this mentioned again. Also the truck drivers and thier frequent stops for extra-marital sex make the spread of disease easier.

I'm not suggesting that every sexual being on the planet should make love in only one way, but risky practices are--well, risky.

Bernard Goldberg had a great chapter in his book Bias about AIDS and the media. This seems along the same lines. To get Americans to care about AIDS people (be it media, doctors, health organizations) must convince Americans that they run a risk of getting the disease. Which obviously means that Americans must be convinced that AIDS is commonly transmitted heterosexually.

These people have nothing to apologize for because in their world it is perfectly OK to lie and deceive people if you are doing it for what you consider a good cause.

AIDS is transmitted by high risk behavior (in this case that behavior is poor health care practices with people who are already infected). As a heterosexual your chances of contacting this disease are just not that probable. Sure you can get a bad tranfusion or a female can get it from a bisexual guy but we all have a better shot of getting hit by a bus than getting an AIDS tainted tansfusion.

I always ask my male friends if they yap about AIDS research and money what they would find more important to research, AIDS or prostate cancer. I know which one I care about more.

The poor medical hygiene theory may make some sense in explaining the intial spread of AIDS in Africa, but I have trouble seeing how it could explain the persistence of the disease.

After all, once a large proportion of the population is infected, the importance of using clean needles, gloves, etc. ought to be pretty obvious to any health care provider. But then again, who knows...

There is a whole community of AIDS activists, some professional researchers, that believe there's a lot of scamming going on over African AIDS. More than one researcher has suggested that the African "AIDS Crisis" is really just the same old problems with malaria and dysentery that have plagued so much of the third world. It's just that if you can find a way to say that a malaria or dysentery victim has AIDS, you get a lot more money from the UN and other NGOs than for the older, less glamorous diseases.

And as it happens, most African AIDS cases aren't tested using those expensive testing kits...

"Women would have to have an improbably large
number of partners..." Thimk: The word for such
women, worldwide, begins with p and rhymes with
institute. The males in question are not partners, they're johns. A working girl who is poz and services 20 men daily can easily infect 40 or so men in the course of one year. The
johns infect their wives, and other prossies on long highway trips. Easy to construct a stochastic model that spreads HIV like the common cold.

"Women would have to have an improbably large
number of partners..." Thimk: The word for such
women, worldwide, begins with p and rhymes with
institute. The males in question are not partners, they're johns. A working girl who is poz and services 20 men daily can easily infect 40 or so men in the course of one year. The
johns infect their wives, and other prossies on long highway trips. Easy to construct a stochastic model that spreads HIV like the common cold.

Sorry about the double post. An itchy mouse finger. John

Michael Fumento's book "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS" had this pegged about 15 years ago. Health care spending in Africa is so small that even health professionals reuse needles. And this is part of the problem with Ebola and other diseases too. Moral - if you want to help with AIDS in Africa, we should be spending our scarce funds on needles, not condoms.

The common local propensity for "dry sex" (ie actively defeating lubrication of the vagina), general promiscuity and the denial of the very existence of homosexuality are also contributors.

Let's not forget the prevalent misreporting of causes of death to reel in the AIDS bucks! It's been said by doctors working in Africa that "it's getting to be impossible not to die of AIDS here." Deaths due to traffic accidents are routinely put down to AIDS -- because each such death reported brings an aliquot of funding for medical care and research from generous governments and other institutions.

"Follow the money" wasn't just meant for Woodward and Bernstein.

The paper in question deals with the spread of AIDS in Africa prior to 1988. Isn't it plausible that poor health practices were the primary cause for a while, until enough people got infected that sexual activity became more important?

Doesn't that fit, in a general way, with how epidemics spread? Growth from poor health practice would be slow because it does not depend on interaction between someone with the disease and someone without. Spread by sexual activity would be exponential, so that the rate of growth from sex would overtake that from health practices after a while, and then race ahead.

So maybe it's not all a secret plot by AIDS activists and environmentalists to slow population growth and get more money for AIDS research.

A new book by Gary Null, "AIDS: A Second Opinion" has many facts about the African "AIDS" crisis. Many of the so-called AIDS cases are diagnosed with no test at all for the HIV virus. One question: do statistics really show that the population of Africa is declining, or the birth rate? If heterosexual AIDS were the "plague" everyone says, the effect should be visible!!

Of course, Peter Duesberg and Kary Mullis, among others, have been saying for years that the HIV virus is NOT the cause of AIDS. Kary Mullis won the Nobel prize for the PCR test, which detects the HIV virus. This site:

http://www.virusmyth.com

has much more. The problem with the medical establishment is that they never bother to 'splain. They just yell racism and homophobia and reactionary prudish conservativism. It's worked for them so far, but their run may be coming to an end, at least as far as AIDS goes.

Sigh. Robert, if you want demographic statistics for Africa, the results of USAID-funded studies are available at http://www.measuredhs.com/. Pay close attention to the numbers of orphaned children; there's a whole generation being raised by their grandparents because their parents have died of AIDS. That is, if you're actually interested in hard facts that may not support Duesberg.

Sigh, Katherine. I just can't get that idiot government website to show any actual numbers. I'm just looking for overall numbers on population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa in the last twenty-five years or so. So I looked at a population estimate for the next 22 years at this site:

http://www.prb.org//Content/ContentGroups/Datasheets/wpds2002/2002_World_Population_Data_Sheet.htm

Hmm. It shows the population of SubSaharan Africa growing from 693 millioin to 1.081 billion by 2025. Some pandemic!

A Population Reference Bureau study had some scare statistics about how many were dying of "AIDS", including the required "orphans" and "raised by grandmothers" statistics. But it had no statement of how many AIDS tests were done and how diagnosis happened. And it had no historical information on how many orphans there were historically. Withouth such information, those numbers are simply special pleading. Most important, as Duesberg and Mullis and others say, just give me a reference to the study that proves that HIV causes AIDS and I will stop protesting. I think you need to read Duesberg's and Mullis's book, or Null's or the others.

Look.

AIDS is extremely hard to transmit UNLESS there is direct contact with bodily fluids of the infected with the (internal AND under the skin) bodily fluids of the prospective infectee.

That is why passive anal sex is a problem for BOTH genders: the rectum isn't designed for that. Fissures/breaks in the mucosa happen a lot there.

Same with vaginal 'dry' sex, using 'stones', concurrent herpes sores, etc. etc.

Clear?

Culture can play a big role. When supernatural factors are a major part of one's concept of disease transmission the chance of contracting and passing on an infectious agent is immensely increased.

Where else in the world is a rash of rapes of girls in their early teens by infected men explained aways by the men believing they would be cured by sex with a virgin. Which in turn helps men who know they are terminally ill justify such horrendous crimes.

This is the region where four schoolteachers were recently murdered for suspicion of being witches who caused the recent Ebola outbreak.

The evidence for HIV causing AIDS is quite good. The problem is that the lack of extensive testing for HIV among ill Africans leaves some doubt as to whether they have a single ailment in common. There are other diseases with similar wasting effects.

A bigger problem may be have some some but not all of the acoutrements of modern civilization. As seen in Europe centuries earlier if you pack a lot of people close together the chances of infectious disease are greatly increased just by virtue of such a vector rich environment. Europe survived long enough to develop standards of sanitation and othe civil engineering efforts that completely changed the nature of urban life.

Africa has acquired some the things that allow for major population, in some case had it thrust upon them, but not enough of accompanying necessities to avoid massive health issues. It's little wonder that the healthiest groups are the relatively isolated tribes. They still have their traditional health issues but have survived those for millenia.

The MEASURE program (part of which the PRB implements) is just now beginning to collect the HIV testing data you're asking for, Robert. I agree that it would be nice if they'd been doing it several years ago. But we'll have reliable data within a few years. They've already done nationwide HIV testing in Mali (article in French) and other countries are coming soon.

As far as Duesberg et al. are concerned, I've seen enough of his stuff to know what his argument is, and I think the medical establishment is right, and he's just plain wrong. But I don't think I'll convince you he's a crackpot looking for his 15 minutes, and I don't think you'll convince me he's a serious scientist who's discovered the truth. So let's just agree to disagree.

Eric,

Concurr with all that.

And once the crazy memes that cause this behavior are delt with, the mechanism is still that which I mentioned.

Anal sex, sex with 'virgins', sharing needles, ...

WHATEVER.

Any will do.

And if it is you, it doesn't matter how, ultimetely.

It does matter if you worry about things that don't matter, and don't worry about things that do ... as is the case with most of my patients.

It all boils down to understanding how that virus is propogated.

And once the people that only natter about the details and the oppressors and the blame and the underlying factors and the innocent, etc., will simply shut up ... and look at the basics ... the issues will be understood by the vulnerable.

And may I remind you ... the body is a fatal, sexually transmitted condition. You already have one.

Oddly, the spread of AIDS in Africa has much to do with the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS. Something not mentioned is that many African tribes have traditionally used heterosexual anal sex as a means of birth control. Also, during 'that time of the month'.
Add that to the female circumcision that goes a long way toward guaranteeing dry sex and it's a small wonder that 'the thin disease' is rampant.
The reality is that a healthy, lubricated vagina is one very effective barrier to the transmission of HIV. As mentioned above, the Herpes sores can break down that barrior.
If we could summon the political will we could stop the spread of HIV/AIDS on a dime. Universal testing and then, quarantine. This, of course, would bring howls from everyone but me so thousands, perhaps millions, will be condemned to a very slow, very expensive death. Sacrifices on the alter of political correctness.

The spread of AIDS via needle could very well be the "smoking gun" in Africa. I have heard talks by two different missionaries, confirmed by my siter in law (an RN with some time over there) that needles are commonly reused in vacination programs in Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Given that transmission via "dirty needles" is the second most common vector in the US why would it be different in Africa?

A very few dollars would go a very long way to resolve a portion of this problem.

Peter and Sagi, supra, have already said most of what I had to comment on about the myth of heterosexual AIDS. Surprise! Disease is spread by unsanitary habits. Look, different cultures have different sexual practices. (Quick, what is the derivation of the word, "buggery?) Cultural diversity, don't you know? An associate once told me, in all good will, when I may have betrayed that I found his preferred technique unesthetic, "Mistuh Lou, Ah tells yo', yo' cain't get no baby from no a**hole." Are you serious about stopping AIDS? It's simple. Teach a myth that an all-powerful Being who sees all and knows all doesn't want you to engage in that particular unsanitary habit. That'll stop the epidemic in short order.

Needle re-use has common practice in third world countries for a long time. Hard to understand why it's take so long to come up with hard data for Africa. There's lots of evidence about the spread of HIV in China due to blood-selling and unsterilized needles.

Very sad. The practice of bad medicine is much much worse than no medicine at all.

Predictions about human behaviour are all pretty worthless because there is an inbuilt 'feedback loop'. That is, if doctors predicted that x million people would have HIV by the year (insert year of your choice here)and enough people believed it then they would alter their behaviour, thus 'disproving' the prediction. In other words, if you can persuade people your prediction is true and people act on that assumption then it automatically becomes false (in this case by practicing safe sex etc. etc.). This is the basic prophet's dilemma; if i predict you will be run down by a car tomorrow on west street, then you don't go to west street and i look like an idiot. Unfortunately the only way you can get the headlines is if you pick a number at random (preferably a high one) and state that that number of people will catch aids or whatever.

I reccomend that those interested in AIDs in Africa read the special report in the Village Voice by Mark Schoofs.It came out last year and won a pulitzer prize and I just checked and it is listed at the bottom of the Voice home page. There is a detailed discription of various sexual practices that may contribute to the spread of HIV.

I reccomend that those interested in AIDs in Africa read the special report in the Village Voice by Mark Schoofs.It came out last year and won a pulitzer prize and I just checked and it is listed at the bottom of the Voice home page. There is a detailed discription of various sexual practices that may contribute to the spread of HIV.

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