Exactly.
I remember the 80s and a bunch of ignorant gits claiming AIDS was a gay plague and looking askance at any straight person who had it (after all, it was impossible for a straight person to get AIDS).
I also remember the discussion changing a bit when Magic Johnson disclosed his condition. And still some ignorant gits wondering how many men the famous womanizer had been with and if the hundreds if not thousands of women were a beard.
“Virtually impossible”?
Risk per sexual act in a high income country without either partner having any genital ulcers is very low, 0.04% per act, but with a regular partner and consequently many acts over time, it is certainly far more than “virtually impossible.” In low income countries the rate is estimated as 10 times higher and higher in particular phases of infection and with genital ulcers present.
Yes, the risk of transmission to a male penetrater is 18 times lower during vaginal than anal sex; significantly lower is still a far cry from virtually impossible.
“[A]lmost 85,000 persons with an AIDS diagnosis, infected through heterosexual sex, have died” And from the same cite we can put a number to IvoryTowerDenizen’s claim: 84% of AIDS in women is from heterosexual contact.
Characterizing heterosexual contact risk for HIV as a lie is disingenuous at best.
And let’s not forget that men wearing condoms isn’t just to protect them from getting from women, but to prevent men passing it to women. It’s not just about protecting the straight guys.
Nope, no whoosh. that was me, relying on the memory of when I read Cecil’s original answer in a book, but not going into the archive to see if there had been any updates.
My bad.
david03801, for the record, the question about worms is not an exception to the general observation that plain and simple answers are pretty much always wrong. I’d still like for you to show your work, though.
Even in Africa, a huge percentage of the men with AIDS who claimed to have gotten it from women were/are lying.
The one other contributing factor is OTHER venereal diseases. About the only way a genuinely straight male can get AIDS from a woman is for him to have a chancre or bleeding sore on his genitals already.
No true Scotsman, huh? If a man claims he got HIV from a woman, he must be lying about being straight, so therefore, no straight guys get HIV from a woman.
Untrue. In the early days when there was no quick, reliable testing for HIV in the blood a blood transfusion was a definite risk for heteros - as proven by Arthur Ashe and Isaac Asimov, both of whom contracted HIV infections due to contaminated blood during heart surgery. It also wiped out much of a generation of hemophiliacs because of their reliance on blood products to treat their condition (Ryan White).
Thank goodness that is now no longer such a concern but yeah, seriously, heterosexuals get blood transfusions as often as gay people do.
You may now return to foaming at the mouth.
Yeah, you got me. NO man would ever deny being gay, would he.
Not the same thing as what you said. Not all men who deny being gay are secretly gay. Some men are actually straight. Some of them get HIV from female partners.
You are just wrong. There is an ENORMOUS amount of research on HIV in Africa, and ALL of it points to primarily heterosexual transmission.
1 in 5 Americans have genital herpes, FYI.
Latest information from AMFAR about women with AIDS–in the USA & overseas. Of course, I know certain people don’t care because these are women. Usually non-white women. Of course, the disease isn’t a quick death sentence, as it used to be. But treatment is expensive…
I’m old enough to remember when AIDS struck here. I worked with a couple of gay guys & we became friends. We had similar interests in art, music & books. I met a bunch of their friends. Then they started dying. By the time they knew what was happening, it was far too late for safe anything. And there was no real treatment. They all died.
I miss them still and then look at evil old Far Right creeps collecting government pensions paid for by my tax dollars. Am I supposed to be glad they are alive because they are het? (Not that I want to imagine their hideous bodies entwined with anything.)
I’m still at a loss as to what the nefarious goal of the great Aids hoax was.
To the extent that the Aids awareness campaign succeeded, it succeeded to get the government to acknowledge the existence of an epidemic, to encourage research into treatment, to discourage stigma, to encourage the teaching and use of safe sex practices. And all of these things were achieved with an entirely proportional awareness campaign.
What is the problem here? That it’s no longer acceptable to stigmatize HIV-positive people? That more people are now aware of how the disease is transmitted and how to take precautions to prevent transmission? That condoms are now more easily obtainable and it’s acceptable to talk about them in public? That programs are available to help prostitutes and drug users prevent getting infected?
I think the moral is that the librulz only love gays and blacks, so, uh, yeah. America!
How huge a percentage?
Don’t know about liberals “pooh-poohing” the threat but, I think the experts are downplaying the threat because they were so successful containing SARS. I’m not so confident. (Also not an expert). Someone who is actively dying while having N/V/D spreads a lot of fluids.
The problem was that whole era was unfortunately timed for those of us who had just arrived at the age where they wanted to fuck everything that moved like people got to do in the 60’s and 70’s.
Just in case, yes, I’m (mostly) kidding.
Resurrecting the zombie here, four months on, with the definitive answer to the OP’s question: this is why.
There were exactly two cases of US-acquired Ebola, and no fatalities. Despite neverending coverage on Fox (an average of eleven stories a day about how we were all doomed), things came out exactly how the “liberal biased” news said it would. None of the cases were among the general public, despite all of the news about how these asymptomatic people had come into contact with millions! The nurse with no symptoms who was forced into partial quarantine (and was widely criticized for not accepting a full one) didn’t infect anybody, either, just like that evil liberal “medical science” said she wouldn’t.
So to conclude: science works for everybody, “liberal” or not. If you still believe scientific questions can be correctly answered by political positions, come on over to the liberal side instead, where we use evidence. We’ve got cookies.
Oh, thank God! There’s someone else still out there! You’re in Redmond, WA? I’m in Atlanta, GA!
Have you heard from any other survivors?
A good point.
Meanwhile I think a few people caught measles in 1… 2… oh, 8 states?
Cite.
When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then we suffer,
FOX News Reporting ain’t the way.
And science says measles is very contagious. So?