No kidding. Thank God for mastrubation, eh?
:eek: I can’t believe I just said that!
Latest data for the EU:
In short, cumulative cases 40% drug user, 30% homo/bisexual contact, 20% heterosexual contact.
BUT most recent year (2001) 33% drug user, 20% homo/bisexual contact, 37% heterosexual contact.
Linear Crack, there is also the cite in my OP that shows how well homosexuality is regarded in Africa.
Here is a cite that shows how Africa is faring in the AIDS epidemic.
I know that no one can know exactly what goes on in every person’s bedroom in Zimbabwe (a country that is prominent in both cites), but I think it’s safe to say that there ain’t a whole lotta gay community over there.
Got that right.
Cecil had a column regarding chances of getting HIV from unprotected vaginal sex a while ago. I don’t remember what the numbers are, but suffice it to say you and baby dodged a very big bullet.
My beef with that is all the heteros getting caught in the crossfires of the supposed Homosexual smiting. Is God really that inaccurate with his weapons? We can shoot missiles into windows from miles away and God can’t inactivate reverse transcriptase in heteros? What a sloppy divine being! Thank God that evil sloppy God isn’t using lightning, he’d end up frying 90% of the people on the planet!
Laurie
By way of chimpanzees. Red-capped mangabeys and spot-nosed guenons were two species of monkeys that chimpanzees in Central Africa, north of the Congo, preferred for food.
Male chimpanzees are fierce hunters, usually hunting in packs. Typically, they eat their prey alive, tearing off their limbs and sucking the blood from exposed sockets, often eventually sharing what meat remains or trading it with females for sex.
But chimpanzees cannot cross rivers. Enter humans, who captured, transported, and then slaughtered and butchered the chimpanzees, establishing the link between Simian and Human HIV.
Most likely through war and centrally-planned immunization programs that proliferated in Africa in the 1940s to 1960s.
The HIV virus (both strains) were weakly pathogenic in Humans (and nonpathogenic in monkeys and chimps) until the late 1960s to early 1970s. During this period, the WHO sponsored massive immunization drives in and around Guinea-Bissau, an area of Africa where infected simians proliferated. Although the official policy was to sterilize syringes (and indeed, WHO provided sterilization equipment), the problem was that the disposable syringes that WHO distributed could not be sterilized.
The virus that was injected into the first humans lived only for a few days. The human immune system quickly and easily destroyed the invading organisms. But when nonsterile needles were reused, they became infected with second and third generation mutations of the virus that were then injected into new humans. These viruses lived a bit longer, having already partially adapted to human immunities.
Over the course of time (a few months), strains of the virus had evolved that were resistant to human immune system defenses, and soon there developed a strongly pathogenic, highly adapted virus that actually thrived in human cells.
The transmission from syringes to Africans would have been without regard to sexual orientation as would the transmission from Africans to Americans, since the virus is unaware of abstract human distinctions among social and geographic classes. The first American to carry the disease could have been a medical doctor, an assistant or other principle from among the on-location personnel. The virus could have spread either by sexual contact or by direct infection from seminal fluid in or on a syringe or in or on a human wound.
The disease might have come to America as early as the 1940s. Portugese soldiers took the disease home between 1960 and 1974, following a regional outbreak near Guinea-Bissau between 1955 and 1970. It is presumed that the soldiers were predominately heterosexual. Immunizers took the disease back to sundry locations all over the world.
It varied over time. Early on, nearly 65% of men who had sex with men contracted the infection in America, while only 5% of heterosexuals did. Now, it is about 35% of homosexual men and 10% of heterosexuals. So, the spread of HIV is decreasing in the gay population while it is increasing in the heterosexual population.
That’s hard to say because the cost of AIDS is directly and indirectly related to costs of other programs. It is like asking how much it costs taxpayers to allow people to live past 50.
Often, it isn’t the cost of treating the infection per se, but rather the defered costs incurred by poor bureaucratic management. For example, it has been estimated that failure to implement a national needle exchange program has cost just over a billion dollars since needle exchanges are cheaper than hospital stays.
Money directly budgeted for AIDS in FY 2003 totals about $540 million dollars, or about $1.86 per person.
Sources:
http://www.aidsstories.com/stats.html
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/stories/s217997.htm
http://www.thebody.com/cdc/news_updates_archive/2003/may13_03/hiv_strain.html
http://www.thebody.com/newsroom/2003/jul15_03/aids_war.html
http://www.thebody.com/cdc/news_updates_archive/2003/jun13_03/aids_origin.html
“A little green monkey over there
Kills a million people,
That’s not fair
Did it really go that way
Did you ask the C.I.A.
Would they take you serious
Or have they been promiscuous”
F.Z.