Holy Jesus that sounds awful!
Excuse me…are people really debating whether or not the following has any kind of place in re: scientific method?
"hahahaha
hahaha oh Christ.
I have no hope for people."
I’m going home now…I’m going to take some heroin and relax.
Um, no.
I think the major cause, far above anything else, has been shown to be that the disease is passed by heterosexual intercourse. The others are factors, but not the major ones. You don’t get 10% to 25% infection rates of the adult population of reproductive age with most other means.
What amazes and baffles me is the allegedly low chance of catching AIDS according to the statistics. Either people have a lot more sex than we think, or there are some very unlucky people. You hear many cases of an encounter or a short affair leading to AIDS infections. How quickly can people typically accomplish the 100 acts of sex required to give them a 50% chance of infection?
Are you just calculating 50*100/10000 for the receptive anal above?
Hey, where did the OP go?
I certainly wasn’t trying to imply that HIV transmission via heterosexual activity wasn’t the major means of transmission. However, there are cultural factors (like FGM and dry sex) that may increase the likelihood of HIV transmission via normal PIV sex, and additionally may increase the rate of other high risk sexual acts due to the consequences of things like FGM.
It probably depends on where you are, but I actually have the opposite experience regarding ‘people catching HIV’. In (parts of) Europe the aids scare is truly non-existant (especially once people look into the numbers) and I often feel the ‘authorities’ would be better off in focussing on other STD’s in their safe sex campaigns.
I’d be interested in a cite…
In South Africa, for example, an estimated 40% of women will be raped over their lifetime. For women over 25 who are raped, there is a 25% chance the rapist will be HIV+. 40% of rape victims in South Africa are children, and their molesters are frequently HIV+. A virgin myth exists promoting a belief that intercourse with a virgin will effect a cure for AIDS.
It’s very difficult to get accurate “sexual practices” data. But it seems an exaggeration to me to suggest that “all available evidence” shows the high rates of HIV are not “primarily attributable to unusual sexual practices.”
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “We don’t know how much any putative variation in sexual practices contributes to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS.”?
I will pull up cites later, but basically you can use computer modeling to show how the spread would vary under different conditions, and unusual practices alone just do not account for the levels we see. Furthermore, all of the practices discussed are very regional. The heavily affected part of Africa is vast, and if any given practice was a main driver, you would certainly see that in geography.
I have been wondering among the same lines as the OP. If we exclude receptive anal sex, then you must have unprotected sex up towards a thousand times, with people infected with HIV, before you have even 50% risk of being affected. I can not get that number to make sense, especially back when only few people in Africa were infected with HIV. It’s like three years of unprotected intercourse àlmost every day, with a HIV infected person? So my random speculation based on this is that there must be HIV hubs, that is prostitutes that do unprotected sex with hundreds of customers every week. It seems incredible to me that people would have unprotected sex with these prostitutes, and I have no citation for it, but otherwise I cannot get the numbers to make sense.
[bolding mine]
Why does it seem so incredible? In a world where AIDS exists, yes, it seems incredibly foolish to not use a condom with a prostitute*, but looking at it from a pre-AIDS point of view, it makes a lot more sense. What happens when you have unprotected sex with a prostitute then? She might get pregnant, but that won’t come back to you. You might get a different STD, but a lot of those can be cured and the ones that can’t aren’t going to kill you. Men who have sex with prostitutes generally don’t about her well being.
AIDS existed for a while before it was recognized at all, and it took even longer to be recognized as a major health risk. Mix that in with misinformation about condoms and it should seem much less incredible that a lot of folks had unprotected sex with prostitutes.
*God, I hate typing that word. I don’t have a problem with the word itself, I just don’t like typing it.
Because good news isn’t news. You only hear of those infected, not those who weren’t.
It’s not just in Africa (with somewhat lesser knowledge on the subject) either… you’d be shocked at the amount of (legal) unprotected sex that happens with prostitutes in western countries as well. And the more you read up on it (0.04%) the less shocking it becomes to you.
The transmission rates cited upthread are for the US and Canada. In Sub Saharan Africa, people are much less likely to be circumcised. Much more likely to have untreated STDs and much more likely to be engaging in dry sex. I can’t find any numbers on the risk of various types of sex in Africa, but they are likely to be much higher than in North America.
If the models don’t accurately reflect the real-life infection rate, then there must be something significant going on in real life that isn’t accounted for in the models. In other words, the models are flawed. Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t tell you anything about how the models are flawed, or what factor it is that they’re failing to account for.
But we’re back to the question - if the odds of contracting the disease are less than 1 in 200 - is rape really a significant issue in transmission rates? (not to minimize the other damage and issues.) This suggests that 1 out of 200 out of 25% out of 40% of the female population will contract the disease for each episode of rape - if my math is right, 2 in 2000 women. Somehow, the number must be higher than that?
I read, for example, about Johnson Aziga - Wikipedia
Between 1996 and 2003 he had sex with 11 women (that they know of) and 7 tested positive for HIV. He was one busy man if it takes as many tries as we are led to believe.
I’ve read a theory somewhere that the real key is concurrent infection with syphilis or another STD causing genital sores which makes HIV transmission much more likely. This is also tied into why HIV only started becoming epidemic in the 20th century, as the creation of large cities and migrant workers together with demand for prostitution and genital sore causing STDs created a perfect HIV spreading environment.
Is it possibly that in cases of rape, the chances of blood contact - and thus HIV transmission - due to vaginal tearing are rather higher?
But we see as an example the risk of being an anal recptor - where there is no natural lubrication and the skin is not “designed” to tolerate the vigorous activity so is more prone to tearing. Even there, the risk is not that high.
5 per 10,000 for the straight penile-vaginal sex…that seems incredibly low.
Look at it this way. You’re a man, and you’re a PLAYA. You have sex with 5 women a week. (I suppose I could say 7, but a man’s gotta rest…)
Anyways, it’s 5 different women a week, with some repeats, all unprotected, and 10% of the population has HIV.
52 weeks a year, so that’s 260 risky sexual encounters a year.
Since only 10% of the population has HIV, you could be expected to need 20,000 total encounters to “catch it”.
That’s 76 years of being a PLAYA. Even Hugh Hefner isn’t that good, I don’t think he got any until he was 13 or 15 or so, and he’s 87 now.
Joking aside, I don’t honestly think an extremely attractive man could keep sleeping around like this for more than 10 years or so total, which is only 2600 total encounters, for a slightly more than 10% chance of catching the HIV.
In real populations, the prevalence rate is much lower. Sounds like you could bareback your way through a lot of countries and not get the disease.
But another factor : just my brief treatment of the numbers reveals a compelling fact. It sounds like if the disease had a high enough prevalence, mere promiscuous heterosexual P-V sex could keep the disease at stable levels in the population. However, it could never have gotten started this way. In the past, when the disease was 1 in a million, there’s no way P-V sex would spread the disease anywhere. It had to have spread around other ways.