So they don’t starve to death. Is that a good enough reason for you?
Remember that we are talking about people living in the jungle area of Africa, 20-30 years ago. People with extremely low income (probably total annual income less than you spend annually on soda) but with the same desire to feed their children & themselves as your parents have. So they hunt & eat whatever animals they can in their area.
i would eat grass and leaves instead!
You can get far worse diseases than HIV from meat. So why don’t you stop?
hehe blake i bet u if u listed them all i would stop…hehe ya someone posted aomething about fast food nation maybe i should buy a copy…
Great post, TSO. Very informative stuff there!
I was about to type, “welcome to the Boards”, but now I notice you’ve been around since last year. 
Ditto, excellent post TSO. Sorry to hear you lost so many friends.
May I request baby Cat please use proper punctuation and spelling. I recognize and allow for mistakes - God knows I make them all the time. But it is agony to read your posts.
I’ve seen that AIDS was originally called GRID–Gay Related Immune Deficiency. I don’t know if that’s true of not. IIRC, Fred Phelps was the one who said it. Of course, polio was originally called “infantal paralysis,” and it was thought that only children could get it.
Lesbians have an extremely low rate of AIDS. Something I bring up everytime AIDS is referred to as a “gay disease.”
baby cat - Welcome aboard.
Just a friendly piece of advice: Do some lurking at this board and get a feel for the posting style. Read the guidelines and rules for the fora.
You’re correct, Annie-Xmas. From Lsura’s link:
Grass & Leaves do not provide sufficient nutrients for a human body to thrive.
Also, do you think these people living a subsistance level existance in the jungle had any knowledge that they could get HIV from eating monkey meat? HIV hadn’t even been discovered yet!
And even if they had known that, that you “could” get something from eating this is of less importance then knowing that they “surely will” starve it they don’t eat. And having children to feed enters into this too.
I’ve heard it said that it was also called “the gay flu” by some, very early on.
AIDS is STILL spreading much faster among gay men than the population at large - nine times faster the last time we had a thread on the topic and I added it up - in North America.
In Africa, the disease is much more proportionately divided between gay and straight, I believe.
False. This is what is not believed now. However, originally it was known as “GRIDS”–“Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome”.
GRIDS was used in the USA in early 1982. The Lancet called it “gay compromise syndrome”
Why was this? Very simple: All cases identified in 1981 to mid 1982 were in homosexual men.
Indeed, as late as 1986 some scientists were still seriously listening to Deusberg’s claims that it was a “lifestyle illness” or some such nonsense.
Is was a relatively short time between the awareness that there was a gay-related immunodeficiency disease and a similar disease showing up in hemophiliacs. So the quasi-rational fear that it was somehow only gays lasted a very short time. But the irrational belief that it was God’s punishment to gays is still with us. What did hemophiliacs do to incur God’s wrath?
As to SIV jumping to humans, Mrs. FtG works with people studying this and they all seem to believe it’s true. Maybe not from eating chimps, but getting close to their blood/saliva/whatever in some other way.
What group currently has the highest incedence of AIDS? Last I heard in the newspaper, young gay men were still the highest risk for getting AIDS. But I’m curious as to how many young gay men actually have AIDS in comparison to straight men, women, rhesus monkeys, etc
Dogface gives a good summation.
A 1993 made-for-TV movie, And the Band Played On, gives a good overview of how AIDS was first identified as a major health issue in the U.S. As noted above, in the early 1980s there was talk of “gay cancer” in some American cities which have large openly gay communities. Next came discussion in medical literature of GRIDS. The name of GRIDS was formally changed to AIDS at an international medical conference.
If the film is to be believed, some public health officials in the U.S. found a kind of perverse relief in identifying Haitians as another significantly at-risk group; there had been complaints within the public health community that as long as AIDS was regarded as a disease of gays, the effort to confine its spread would not be given adequate attention or funding. President Reagan went through most of his presidency without speaking the word “AIDS” in public. A number of conservative pundits–most conspicuously the Reverend Jerry Falwell–stated that the disease was a punishment from God directed at homosexuals. Rush Limbaugh expressed similar opinions in videotaped speeches. Why the rate of transmissian among Lesbians was low was not addressed in such rants.
The film also suggests–as various studies have documented–that the gay bath house scene in several American cities was an important means for spreading the disease during its first years in the U.S. In particular, a French Canadian male airline attendant
has been identified as a kind of “Typhoid Mary” who may have unwittingly infected hundreds of partners.
Some right wing pundits have persisted in insisting that AIDS is “primarily” a disease of gays, or of gays and drug abusers. The last time I looked, columnist Mona Charen was still taking this tack. Interestingly, another of her favorite themes is that aren’t really as many homosexuals in the world as people claim.
I’m not sure (putting aside the merits as this is GQ) how the two propositions you attribute to her are logically inconsistent (but perhaps you weren’t suggesting they were?). “A small[er than we’ve been led to believe] population is the primary vector for a particular disease.” Could be true, could be false. Not logically impossible.
It seems hard to dispute that some of the Kinsey-type “statistics” about a 10% incidence of homosexuality were loudly made, but are not sustainable.
Michael Fumento’s “The Myth Of Heterosexual AIDS” had some interesting (possibly by now dated, in view of the fact that U.S. heterosexual, non-IV/non-hemophiliac AIDS rates have risen from a level of almost nil to something more than nil) discussions of how the link between homosexuality and AIDS prevalence became a political football.
I once worked for Mike Gottlieb, the doctor who is credited with reporting the first AIDS cases to the CDC in late 1981. Federal funding for AIDS research was horrible until about 1987. Gottlieb basically destroyed his academic career by going over the heads of UCLA administration to ask for funding from the state of California.
UCLA Medical Center will live in infamy for turning down a request by Sheldon Andelson’s estate in 1986 (I think, memory faulty) to establish an HIV (then HTLV-III) research unit. They didn’t want to be known as “that” kind of hospital back then (they’ve since become one of the better medical research institutions re HIV.)
FWIW, the number of reported non-IV related lesbian HIV infections can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It seems to be something of a sore point for the more rabid fundamentalists. They still try brushing lesbians with the same specious “God’s punishment” argument-- first with HPV, the virus that leads to cervical cancer (except that about 80% of ALL women will be exposed to HPV and 100% of the cases are male-to-female transmission, despite the reported sexual orientation of the subject.) Then they tried breast cancer rates (no, that’s childless women in general) and finally bacterial vaginosis since there is a slightly higher rate of this in the lesbian community (big effin’ deal, pretty much clears itself up and isn’t sexually transmitted). It seems to disappoint some folks that we aren’t dying in droves.