Does HIV Cause AIDS?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
101

[quote]vroom wrote:
Umm, I don’t mean to offend anyone, but as a blood born disease, women happen to discharge a fair amount of blood on a regular basis.

With an active hetero partner, he will be exposed to that blood quite a lot over time…[/quote]

Read the first link in my last post, Vroom. He doesn’t specify whether the women were menstruating or not, but he does get into detail about the stats of men getting HIV from vaginal sex with women. They’re next to nil. Even if the woman were menstruating, it’s likely that the man would need to have an open sore or a cut or something for it to enter his bloodstream. Even the tip of the urethra isn’t a likely entrance point, for a variety of reasons.

But regardless, what was studied over long periods of time were long-term relationships (spouses or long-term boyfriend/girlfriend relationships), over a period of years, where only one partner had HIV to begin with. It was found that when it was the woman who had it to begin with, the male almost never got it (except in a rare case where there were over 100 incidents involving both vaginal and penile bleeding reported among that couple!!? Who knows what they were doing?!).

I’m just tellin’ ya’ what he says . . . .

102

I know it’s the establishment but CDC’s website says as of 2004 there are
59,939 cases of HIV/AIDS in the US in males who acquired it through hetero contact. Stats could be skewed and the guys could all be lying and hiding in the closet. Or, it could just be possible that men can get it from women.
I don’t believe the survey is even active in all 50 states.

Note. These numbers do not represent reported case counts. Rather, these numbers are point estimates, which result from
adjustments of reported case counts. The reported case counts are adjusted for reporting delays and for redistribution of cases in
persons initially reported without an identified risk factor. The estimates do not include adjustment for incomplete reporting.

103

[quote]johnny boy wrote:
I know it’s the establishment but CDC’s website says as of 2004 there are
59,939 cases of HIV/AIDS in the US in males who acquired it through hetero contact. Stats could be skewed and the guys could all be lying and hiding in the closet. Or, it could just be possible that men can get it from women.
I don’t believe the survey is even active in all 50 states.

Note. These numbers do not represent reported case counts. Rather, these numbers are point estimates, which result from
adjustments of reported case counts. The reported case counts are adjusted for reporting delays and for redistribution of cases in
persons initially reported without an identified risk factor. The estimates do not include adjustment for incomplete reporting.[/quote]

JohnnyBoy,

The facts ARE skewed, which is exactly what Fumento delves into (and he explains how/why they’re skewed) in the first link I posted (a couple posts ago). The short story is that almost all males who reported to have gotten it from sex with a woman, upon much more intense interviewing, revealed that there was much more to the story than met the eye (be it instances of gay sex – sometimes many – injecting drugs, etc.). This happened to a startling degree.

104

From that first link I posted:

–

"New York City carefully tracked its alleged
heterosexual male AIDS cases ? and found it had virtually none.

The major exception was New York, where officials knew this was indeed the most crucial question regarding how far the epidemic would spread. As a result, they made it a policy to carefully interview all men who claimed to have been infected by a woman. They found that practically nobody fell into this category. Indeed, one of the few men they were convinced truly had no risk factors other than vaginal intercourse proved to have been a minor actor in gay pornography!

Thus while other health departments were reporting female-to-male transmissions left and right (and do so to this day) simply because whenever a man said he got HIV from sex with a woman they took his word for it, New York was screening these people out with careful interviews. Later it scaled back and then essentially ceased the interviewing process, inevitably leading to New York male “heterosexual transmission” cases going through the roof.

“I was appalled,” said Sonnabend, who had worked for the Department of Health in the 1970s. “A number that was about 18 suddenly became 400 or 500, just because they stopped interviewing.”

Still, if you looked at the handful of female-to-male transmission cases in New York while interviewing was still going on, and knew that New York had more AIDS cases than any other city in the country, it was clear that if such transmission were so rare there it would be rare everywhere. Case closed. You didn?t even need to know how efficiently men infected women. The lack of infection going back the other way essentially constituted a disease “firebreak.”

But as time went on, which is to say after I published my first AIDS article saying all this in 1987, the statistical evidence did come in supporting that simple observation. This came from partner studies, in which sexually-active couples were observed (no, not literally) to see how often the infected person transmitted the virus to his or her partner. In the great majority of these, the originally infected person was a man. These found that about 20 percent of the time per relationship, the virus was transmitted from man to woman.

In the largest of these studies, by Nancy Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, this came out to about one infection per 1,000 acts of intercourse. To be fair, some of these couples were using condoms. On the other hand, others were engaging in anal sex, well-established as a more efficient transmitter of HIV than vaginal intercourse. Padian?s latest and probably final study came out in 1997 and showed 19 percent of female partners were ultimately infected over 10-year period."

105

[quote]Damici wrote:
vroom wrote:
Umm, I don’t mean to offend anyone, but as a blood born disease, women happen to discharge a fair amount of blood on a regular basis.

With an active hetero partner, he will be exposed to that blood quite a lot over time…

Read the first link in my last post, Vroom. He doesn’t specify whether the women were menstruating or not, but he does get into detail about the stats of men getting HIV from vaginal sex with women. They’re next to nil. Even if the woman were menstruating, it’s likely that the man would need to have an open sore or a cut or something for it to enter his bloodstream. Even the tip of the urethra isn’t a likely entrance point, for a variety of reasons.

But regardless, what was studied over long periods of time were long-term relationships (spouses or long-term boyfriend/girlfriend relationships), over a period of years, where only one partner had HIV to begin with. It was found that when it was the woman who had it to begin with, the male almost never got it (except in a rare case where there were over 100 incidents involving both vaginal and penile bleeding reported among that couple!!? Who knows what they were doing?!).

I’m just tellin’ ya’ what he says . . . .[/quote]

Damici, are these couples aware of the fact that she has HIV, or are they unaware. Obviously, how people behave will be impacted dramatically.

106

[quote]vroom wrote:
Damici wrote:
vroom wrote:
Umm, I don’t mean to offend anyone, but as a blood born disease, women happen to discharge a fair amount of blood on a regular basis.

With an active hetero partner, he will be exposed to that blood quite a lot over time…

Read the first link in my last post, Vroom. He doesn’t specify whether the women were menstruating or not, but he does get into detail about the stats of men getting HIV from vaginal sex with women. They’re next to nil. Even if the woman were menstruating, it’s likely that the man would need to have an open sore or a cut or something for it to enter his bloodstream. Even the tip of the urethra isn’t a likely entrance point, for a variety of reasons.

But regardless, what was studied over long periods of time were long-term relationships (spouses or long-term boyfriend/girlfriend relationships), over a period of years, where only one partner had HIV to begin with. It was found that when it was the woman who had it to begin with, the male almost never got it (except in a rare case where there were over 100 incidents involving both vaginal and penile bleeding reported among that couple!!? Who knows what they were doing?!).

I’m just tellin’ ya’ what he says . . . .

Damici, are these couples aware of the fact that she has HIV, or are they unaware. Obviously, how people behave will be impacted dramatically.[/quote]

Woops, meant to quote this too:

"What about woman to man? The first such partner study was again conducted by Padian. It found that of 41 originally uninfected men, over a period of years only one became positive and that relationship involved “over 100 episodes of vaginal and penile bleeding.” Her 1997 final report found two of 82 male partners had become infected, for a transmission rate of 2.4 percent over 10 years.

Padian?s final report put female-to-male transmission efficiency at about one-eighth the rate for going in the opposite direction. Other studies have since confirmed this. Again, when it takes 100 people to infect at least 101 for an epidemic to spread, one infected man per 42 who were regularly exposed to the virus is not going to do the trick."

It doesn’t seem to mention whether or not they were aware, but one would assume that in both cases they were, as they were being studied. :wink: Both cases meaning, the cases in which the male was the only one who had it initially and the cases where the female was the only one who had it initially. Under similar circumstances, male-to-female was possible, though it only happened 20% of the time per RELATIONSHIP (meaning over the course of many-years-long relationships, only 20% of the women got it), yet female-to-male was next to non-existent.

One would assume that, in both cases (since they were being studied), all the participants knew that one of them had HIV.

107

Damici,

I’m certainly not arguing the point that there will be different rates of transmission depending on the direction of transmission between partners.

Regardless, I don’t think it really means very much.

I find it difficult to ascertain the danger involved in unprotected sex amongst hetereosexuals “in the wild” from such a study.

If you are simply suggesting that the possibility of a full blown epidemic is questionable, I have no argument with that either.

Does this mean that we should ignore the disease, because it really only hits groups that we traditionally haven’t cared very much about? This is where this line of reasoning tends to lead us…

Don’t worry about it… there isn’t much danger to mainstream society, so stop spending money on it.

Let’s stop beating around the bush. We all know AIDS exists. We all know HIV exists. We all know those groups that are at highest risk.

What are you, or the authors of the studies you are referencing, suggesting that we do or don’t do? I mean, short of that, why are we still having this conversation anyway?

108

Vroom,

I wasn’t suggesting a whole lot actually, other than that I think the author makes boatloads of sense. If you read the links I posted (please do :)) you’ll hear some of his thoughts on what this means as far as the existence and prevalance of the disease and what should be done about it, which I tend to agree with. He basically says that pretending it’s “everyone’s problem” (which it’s not, based on the facts and numbers) doesn’t help anyone, and actually causes funding that should be heavily targeted almost solely on the gay and intravenous drug using communities in this country to be stupidly wasted on the heterosexual community.

He also points out that gay rights and AIDS activist groups are, understandably, upset about his conclusions because their ability to drum up funding for AIDS research is dependant on everyone, including the majority of Americans (most of whom are straight and don’t use intravenous drugs) believing that it’s something that could affect them, and therefore supporting funding for it. While the truth about HIV’s very low levels of existence in the straight, non-drug-using community will probably have the unfortunate effect of reducing public (and private) monies that are spent on AIDS research, he points out that diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and many others kill FAR more people than AIDS does, yet often don’t get nearly as much funding, so perhaps a refocusing of funding would be a sensible thing.

Just things to ponder. Seriously.

109

Damici~
What does Fumento say about HIV/AIDS in the countries with high rates of them, male versus female?

110

OK, I’m going to throw in another link to some “craziness” by a Dr. Mohammed Al-Bayati.

mercola.com/2001/jul/11/aids.htm

He says…

WTF? Well, try to get past the crazy part and read what he has to say about corticosteroids and glucocortocoids.

So maybe this guy is whacked, or maybe he’s on to something.

I think Fumento’s work has shown that there’s a lot of bad information out there about AIDS. So is it just slightly possible, even slightly, that maybe we’ve either gone down the wrong path or we’re overlooking something important about AIDS? Is HIV just one of several necessary factors?

What if the sun actually does NOT revolve around the earth? Is that at all possible?

Don’t bother answering. Those are all rhetorical questions.

111

[quote]chinadoll wrote:
Damici~
What does Fumento say about HIV/AIDS in the countries with high rates of them, male versus female?[/quote]

Check out the second link I posted.

112

[quote]Damici wrote:
I wasn’t suggesting a whole lot actually, other than that I think the author makes boatloads of sense…

…so perhaps a refocusing of funding would be a sensible thing.

Just things to ponder. Seriously.[/quote]

Make up your mind Damici. Either you are pushing at this topic for a reason or you aren’t.

In your response to me you suggest you aren’t suggesting anything, but then you go on to outline what the author does suggest and that we should think about it.

Now, I don’t have a problem if you wish to discuss optimal allocation of funds to investigate diseases. Pony up and take that stance if it is yours.

I do however have trouble deciding not to spend money on this issue because of the types of people that are likely to be impacted by the disease.

What that really amounts to is…

Fuck it, it’s only gay people and drug users and poor people in other countries, lets not bother wasting our time and effort on this problem, it isn’t like there is a high probability it will affect anyone I know.

If it is in fact something else, just fill us in on the details.

I am amenable to consider that the epidemic we were all warned of could have been hyped… though I would suggest that it would just have been people being cautious. Take a look around at the thinking concerning the bird flu.

People are “hyping it” and making it out to be a big epidemic. Maybe it won’t be as bad as people suggest, but you certainly don’t plan for possible disasters by assuming they won’t be all that significant.

Rewriting history to put a conspiracy spin on it is a tricky game, and it gets played a lot. We can dig into this stuff without either viewpoint having to be villified if we can avoid doing that…

113

Wow, Vroom, panties all in a twist! I’m surprised at you! YOU’RE usually the guy who says, “I’m not necessarily saying this is or isn’t right, I’m just throwing it there to get a discussion going!” My, my!

Truthfully, I guess I’m about 90% convinced by Fumento’s argument, but am open to suggestions that might convince me otherwise. How’s that? Is that a “stance” enough for ya’?

Oh, and he wasn’t “rewriting” any history. He was actually doing just the opposite, if you read any of the links I posted. He was pointing out how those who made dire predictions about how and to what extent AIDS would spread in the 80’s and 90’s turned out to be wildly wrong.

More tomorrow. I must sleep now.

:slight_smile:

114

Did you actually read my post Damici? I’m perfectly willing to accept that mistakes were made and so forth. I’ve suggested something that some people argue for that I think is quite inappropriate.

Figure out what you are arguing for, or against, and simply let us know.

115

[quote]vroom wrote:
What that really amounts to is…

Fuck it, it’s only gay people and drug users and poor people in other countries, lets not bother wasting our time and effort on this problem, it isn’t like there is a high probability it will affect anyone I know.
[/quote]

Uh oh. :slight_smile:

The funny thing about this that many folks may not realize, is all of the money spent on AIDS research has given us a great deal of usable info and techniques for dealing with viruses in general.

Even if you are the worst form of bigot and don’t give a crrrrap about the “high-risk” folks, the research has helped us all whether you realize it or not.

116

Let’s suppose for a moment that there is only a 90% chance that HIV cause AIDS, or 80%, or 70%, of whatever. It’s a pretty good hypothesis, as when treated with drugs which have been designed around HIV, patient’s life spans go from weeks to years, and as importantly, infants of HIV positive mothers can be prevented from developing from carrying HIV, and never develop AIDS. That in and of itself is not proof positive (there never is), but it’s evidence that I as a layman in epidemiology and everyone else as a layman can appreciate.

You have some doubt, and some questions, but what is your actual proposition for action? What is your alternate hypothesis? What do you actually propose politicians in subSaharan Africa do? Should they act on their doubt, and cancel HIV measures? For what? Unless you actually have some program based on a hypothesis that they should do instead, your advice and your doubts are not actionable. I might want to believe your hypothesis, but doubts are not hypothesises. It’s just the same as in the little Rand that I have read, that it’s very easy to take away from the positive efforts with actions that look authentic but aren’t. All (and I mean all) the tools in science are only good for comparing and contrasting different hypothesises. They don’t do dick for proving or disproving a theory in and of itself. The same trick gets used in Creationism, Duesberg Hypothesis, and the Controlled demolition belief of 9-11. Of these, controlled demolition starts out with a claim, but doesn’t connect that to the phenomena in a predictive way. All of these rely more on casting doubt, which is nice, and is defacto necessary in fact for science to work. The top AIDS scientists in the world probably don’t have doubt regarding the causative role of HIV in AIDS, but I bet they have doubt in every experiment they do, on whether certain drugs delay AIDS, the different mechanisms for doing that, etc…

Science is (or should be) belief-neutral, and doubt is the prophylactic you use to preserve yourself from seeing what you want to see. Individual scientists and arguments don’t neccesarily get it, but the scientific method is one of the most crucial parts of modern thought. That method includes the steps, generate a hypothesis, extend predictions from the hypothesis to the scientific problem, and test the predictions.

Citing experts helps if supports your hypothesis, and their reasoning segues into yours; but by listing experts who disagree to an extent amongst themselves, i don’t believe that you’re drawing together their arguments into a coherent theory of your own. Argument from authority (which is different than citing experts) and arguing from the gaps (of which i would explicitly like to be made aware) is not scientific, even if it is critical.

117

Damici, I’m aware that as a male, the chances of me not obtaining HIV from heterosexual contact are not high (especially as infrequently as I get laid). I believe I’ve seen figures on something of the order of 1/609 for vaginal sex with an HIV infected woman.

That said, I’m not going to stop wearing condoms or etc…Did the government and interest groups overstate the risk of AIDS to heterosexual males in the US? They probably did, so what? You don’t really have the luxury of telling key demographics to please pretty please, stop fucking crack whores, but only so much. It’s not surgery, it’s health PR and education, and you don’t have the luxuries of precluding key demographics, especially for two reasons:

  1. Even if the risk is low for us, it is not as low for our sex partners, and the level of sophisticated thought that I’m pretty sure I don’t have HIV,. but maybe I should wear a condom even though i don’t normally so I don’t transmit it to the woman I love seems a bit nuanced for the horny male mind to me; wear a condom always with a new partner because of HIV is a lot easier, helps everybody in the long run, and doesn’t really hurt me other than the 50 yr old woman at meijer’s in 2 in the morn who leers at me when I buy them; and

  2. bc it’s literally a life or death issue.

118

Also, I’ve read work suggesting the virulence of AIDS in Africa may have something to do with malnutrition, as an aggravating (but definitely not mediating) factor. I want to point out that there is debate in the field, but that it’s settled the point of whether HIV is causative or not.

I would say regarding perish or publish (I’m working on a PhD) that you have a lot more to gain by knocking down the dominant theory (whether or not you have one of your own, unfortunately) than youd do by incrementally confirming the dominant theory.

119

My last post for the night, sorry.

Reading the site, all the quotes save two are fifteen years old. That’s eons in science years. Reinterview them, and half at least will have changed their tune. Also, they’re nice quotes, but in and of themselves i don’t see what refutes what. It’s a quote, it’s not evidence or hypotheses.

120

[quote]zarathus wrote:
I would say regarding perish or publish (I’m working on a PhD) that you have a lot more to gain by knocking down the dominant theory (whether or not you have one of your own, unfortunately) than youd do by incrementally confirming the dominant theory. [/quote]

LOL Somebody who understands the business of modern science. Nice.