Damici,
[quote]Damici wrote:
chinadoll wrote:
Damici~
What does Fumento say about HIV/AIDS in the countries with high rates of them, male versus female?
Check out the second link I posted.[/quote]
From your link:
[quote]CA: What are your thoughts on Africa, where the majority of instances are reported to be transmitted heterosexually?
Fumento: I actually have an entire chapter in my book entitled ?But What About Africa?? The first thing to understand is that all diseases have different patterns from continent to continent. In Africa, there is a huge problem with tuberculosis and malaria; the United States has TB, the United States has malaria, but very few people get these diseases in the United States, and almost nobody dies from them any more. Beyond that, it is important to ask, what are the differences in Africa?
Well the major one in Africa is that they do not spend much money on hygiene. They are just the pits. One reflection of that is that they don’t have the money to clean up the blood supply. This is especially a problem in a continent where whole-body transfusions are used to treat malaria.
So, they?re getting it from the blood supply and they?re also getting it from the hospitals and clinics, because again, they can’t afford to simply discard their syringes and needles like we do in the United States. They feel that they have to reuse them. In doing so, they are spreading AIDS in their hospitals similar to how we spread AIDS in our ?shooting galleries? that is, among intravenous drug users. [/quote]
The above seems to be a bit of an outdated (and too generalising) argument: “Infections as a result of contaminated blood products, blood transfusions or a lack of infection control measures in health care settings are generally on the decline, but remain problems in some countries. The percentage of total reported AIDS cases attributed to contaminated blood decreased from 12% in 1993 to 0.4% in 2003 (WHO/EMRO, 2005).”
http://www.who.int/hiv/epi-update2005_en.pdf
This is the only reference I could find in the WHO report on this topic (it refers to Middle East and North Africa) - I think this shows its significance.
[quote]Now, what things like this do is that they create a reservoir of AIDS among the heterosexuals so that if I went to a singles bar where I live in the United States, maybe one in 5,000 girls in that singles bar are infected with the AIDS virus. If I brought a girl home, I would have a one in 5,000 chance. If I went to a singles bar in Kinshasa, Zaire, I might have a one in five chance of bringing home an infected person. Clearly, the more people out there infected, the more potential there is to infect even more people.
Now the final fact, and perhaps the most important in Africa, is the “sexually transmitted disease co-factor.” What this means is that 30 diseases, such as syphilis, cause lesions in the genitals, both the penis and the vagina, and greatly facilitate the transmission of the AIDS virus. Africa is absolutely ripe with these diseases?[/quote]
Interesting that with this argument he opens up the possibility of female to male transmission - when a STD is already prevalent. Check http://www.cdc.gov for an update on STDs in the US.
And here is, where I have the biggest problem with his argument - HIV is a problem that is not only concerning other countries than the US; it is a worldwide problem, and shrugging it off as a small danger to the US population is indeed very problematic:
Yes, most likely, there will be no epidemic among the heterosexual population in the US, but not because there is no “female to male” transmission (the whole report firmly supports that fact), but because the US were “lucky” as it did mainly hit a minority first.
In countries where this didn?t happen, there is an epidemic and creating a false sense of safety has been a feature in many of them, before it became one.
"Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden, at least one third of HIV infections attributable to heterosexual contact were probably acquired abroad, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Most HIV-infected migrants are unaware of their serostatus, and many of them are women.
For example, among HIV diagnoses attributed to heterosexual contact in France during 2003, 69% were migrants, almost two thirds (65%) of who were women (Lot et al., 2004). In the 18 western European countries with HIV data for 2004, women comprised 35% of all new diagnoses, up from 29% in 2000 (EuroHIV, 2005). Prevention, treatment and care strategies in Western Europe have to be adapted in order to reach migrant populations and women more effectively."
http://www.who.int/hiv/epi-update2005_en.pdf
That it has not become an epidemic, can IMO mostly be attributed to high levels of alertness and some (perhaps overblown) alarmism. With the fear of the disease on the decline, and international travel (sex tourism anyone?) it is important to be watchful and continuously careful. A “this is only a minority / non-US problem” mentality is problematic at best.
Makkun
