You are a dumb sack of ignorant shit and you do not know what you are talking about.
Let me give you an example. I will use small words whenever possible. Please try to follow along, and perhaps we shall reduce your dumb-shit-ness. Okay?
Halloween night, I went to a party with my wife. My wife is an epidemiologist. I am sorry for the big word. This means she studies disease in populations. (Population means “large group of people.”) It is a separate field from studying disease in an individual (“one person”). By studying disease in a population, it is possible to determine (“figure out”) how the disease spreads, what the risk factors are, and where to focus education and prevention efforts in order to reduce or eliminate the spread of the disease.
As a nice dollar-obsessed chap, you should agree with this. By understanding how the disease moves through the population, and by focusing prevention efforts accordingly, one uses one’s resources (“money”) more efficiently. (“Efficient” means “more bang for the buck.”)
Okay. So. I’m at the party with my epidemiologist wife. There are other epidemiologists there. They are studying AIDS. Much technical discussion (“shop talk”) follows.
For a lot of the time, the talk centers on “concurrency.” This is another big word, and it’s going to take a bit to explain. Please try to focus.
One of the mysteries (“unknown things”) in AIDS research has been the highly variable (“lots of different”) infection rates between different populations when compared to the spread of previous sexually transmitted diseases, like gonorrhea (“the clap”) and syphilis (“the melting Frenchman”). According to existing theories based on these known diseases, the number of sexual partners has a positive correlation with rates of infection (“as one goes up, the other goes up by about the same amount”). This is not necessarily true about AIDS.
For example: Let’s compare the United States, Uganda, and Thailand. Three very different countries with three very different cultures.
In the United States, sexual behavior (“who you fuck”) is best described as “serial monogamy.” In other words, you’re sleeping with one person at a time. A new relationship doesn’t begin until the old relationship ends. Obviously, there are times when this isn’t the case, but they are exceptions. In a two-year period, you may have three or four partners, each individually with no overlap. If you draw it as a picture, it looks like this:
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In Uganda, sexual behavior may be described as “monogamy mixed with concurrent polygamy.” Rather than trying to explain it in confusing words, let me go straight to the picture.
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Each line represents (“stands for”) a partner. A given partnership does not end before you begin the next one. There is overlap for a while, but you’re only sleeping with two people. Then the first one ends, and you’re monogamous with the second. Then you start with the third while you’re still with the second, and occasionally a fourth person at the end of the time you’re also with the second and third. And so on. In a two-year period, you may have six or eight partners, with overlap of two at a time for many. This is true for men and women.
In Thailand, sexual behavior may be described as “long term monogamy with frequent brief anonymous dalliances.” Again, here is a picture.
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You stay with one person for a long time, but during that time, you have regular one-night stands with people you meet in bars or with sex workers. In a two-year period, you may have fifteen partners or more.
If we use what we know about the old diseases, we would expect the rate of AIDS infection to be lowest in the U.S., and highest in Thailand, with Uganda in the middle. That is what we would believe if we thought we already had all the answers and didn’t need to do any studies, the way you, Brutus, you dumb sack of shit, say we don’t need to.
But — and don’t be too surprised now — if we did that, we would be wrong.
Here are the actual rates, as of a recent disease census (“survey”):
United States: 1%
Thailand: 2%
Uganda: 18%
Now, how could this be? It goes against what we know about sexually transmitted disease. Something is different. And until we know what is different, we don’t know how to deal with the different rates of disease.
Thankfully, we have epidemiologists (remember?), who use scientific techniques (“smart stuff you have to not be a dumb sack of shit to understand”) to figure this kind of thing out. And yay! somebody recently has done exactly that. As it happens, number of partners is not the important thing to measure. Concurrence is the key. That is, long-term overlapping partnerships are more important for AIDS infection than a large number of partnerships.
Why is this?
Because you don’t necessarily get AIDS the first time you have sex with somebody. You might, of course, but the risk is not one hundred percent (“guaranteed”). It’s possible to have sex with an infected person ten times and not get AIDS — but the risk goes up the longer you have sex with that person.
Are you starting to get the picture?
In Thailand, the one-night stands do not give the disease a high likelihood of transmission during any one encounter. By contrast, in Uganda, even though you have sex with fewer people, you are more likely to get the disease if one of your partners has it, because you’re having sex with him or her for a longer period.
The smart scientists have determined that by using concurrence as the primary variable (“hinge factor by which…” never mind, it’s too hard) in the social model, they can very accurately predict infection rates in a population, even without using any other of the conventional predictors (“old theories”). We would not have known this if the smart scientists had not been doing their studies on all sorts of people. We would have been confused, because we would have tried to predict how the new disease works based on what we knew about the old disease, and we would have been wrong. We would be wasting money on prevention methods that do not relate to the actual conditions of infection, and we would be doing nothing to stop the disease.
So, Brutus, it is a good thing you are not in charge, because the research (“studying things”) you say we do not need has actually been telling us some very interesting and useful information we did not expect. If you actually were in charge, you would not help the smart scientists do their work, because you already think you have all the answers, even though you’re just a dumb sack of shit. And we would probably all be sick, too, because we wouldn’t know anything about anything.
And to everybody who is not a dumb sack of shit, isn’t concurrence interesting? Based on the way the epidemiologists at the party were talking about it, it’s the newest thing to hit AIDS research, and it’s going to be big.