Posted on 09/11/2009 3:07:18 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Click on excerpt link to see chart!!!
(Excerpt) Read more at aras.ab.ca ...
Gotcha now...great find!!!
Bigger than people realize, more a threat to livestock, but also, you need to consider that West Nile is carried by mosquitoes so funding to eradicate them has other benefits of lowering other mosquito born illnesses.
I’d really like to see a breakdown of how these dollars are being spent, not just for the HIV/AIDS category, but also for the other wild outliers, breast cancer, and (on a per patient basis) West Nile virus. And I’d like to see the whole federal government funding picture, not just “NIH research dollars” for the other diseases, not just the outliers. I suspect the ratio between total federal funding and NIH funding is especially outrageous for AIDS, because of a massive number of politically-motivated “educational” programs (some of which boil to down to titillating sessions with graphic instruction in how to have lots and lots and lots of sex while sorta kinda hopefully minimizing your chance of catching or transmitting HIV) and disability payments to AIDS patients (I doubt that the total funding chart you linked to includes the disability payments).
Many years ago, I had a passing acquaintance with an HIV+ friend of a friend. This young man was getting a huge housing voucher (I believe it was directly from New York State or New York City, but a good chunk may have been ultimately coming from federal funds), sufficient to pay the full cost of a comfortable apartment, based on his “disability”, and also some sort of cash welfare payments (I think at least partly federal) and food stamps, while he attended a “job training” program in “Landscape Design”. Mind you there was no way he had the qualifications or connections to get any sort of employment in actual landscape *design*, and the program sounded like it was actually preparing people to doing mowing/mulching/hedgetrimming type work — in other words, manual labor that couldn’t possibility be performed by anyone who had a legitimate physical disability, and that is normally done by people with no formal training. The fellow was out partying 7 nights a week and didn’t show the slightest sign of illness. He also seemed to have plenty of spare cash, since he shared his excitement over the new piercings he’d gotten in unspeakable places, with accompanying little bits of gold jewelry. I’d guesstimate, translated into today’s dollars, that he was directly receiving about $30,000 a year in cash, housing vouchers, and food stamps, plus Medicaid, plus the “job training” program was covered, so altogether probably over $75,000/year to the taxpayers. This was for an “AIDS” patient who wasn’t even sick yet, and if his infection continued to develop slowly, would likely survive another 15-20 years, with gradually decreasing ability to work (hardly relevant, since he wasn’t working and had no real intention of working) and gradually increasing annual medical care costs. The final tab for that particular patient probably came in at over $1 million, and I have no reason to think he was an unusual case.
Looking at NIH funding alone doesn’t give a clear picture for other diseases either, since they vary tremendously in what type of research is suited to the disease. West Nile looks like a far more insane outlier in that table than AIDS or breast cancer, but there’s probably very little federal spending related to WNV other than NIH research and some data-gathering/processing by the CDC. And there would probably be little funding at the state level, except for seasonal spraying in certain areas, and breast cancer probably only gets a bit more non-NIH federal funding than WNV, through Medicare and Medicaid (for both screening and treatment). On the other hand, as noted above, NIH-funding is probably a tiny drop in the bucket when considering the total federal taxpayers’ bill for HIV/AIDS. WNV is clearly a real public health issue, which emerged rather suddenly, creating a need for a burst of research to find out how big a threat it really is, and for which research is appropriately done under the auspices of a federal agency, and drawing on resources from other federal agencies with expertise in entomology, local/regional weather patterns, local/regional wetlands geography, immigration/customs, etc. Breast cancer, however, is suited to having a lot of research done out of large hospitals, and with a lot of private funding — not much the federal government can really add other than cash.
So does breast cancer, especially as compared to prostate cancer.
See my profile page, for another side on what causes AIDS, and what the government was up to by fanning the flames of panic (that never materialized). Pay particular attention to the “press section”, and you might also want to watch “The AIDS Catch” video. It’s a bit dated, but it is still excellent. Drop me a PM or Ping if you would like to be added to the Rethinking Public Health list.
All the best—GGG
PS Did you take a look at the table in reply #1???
Funding has be come a political tool, instead of a social economic benefit…has anyone noticed that there have not been very many scientific returns in AIDs versus Cancers?
Indeed. And like AIDS, it's overwhelmingly self-inflicted. Personally, I want to see my tax dollars focus on diseases that are not self-inflicted, and preferably federal tax dollars should only be spent on truly *public* health threats -- i.e. highly contagious diseases that threaten people going about their legitimate daily business -- these present issues of national security concern. It's not at all clear to me that the federal government has any business spending money on research for diseases which are unfortunate for the individuals who have them through no fault of their own, but pose no threat to the general public (though of course, as long as the federal government *is* funding that sort of research, the allocation of funding should reflect the number of people affected).
And just how big a threat is West Nile?
Pretty big, potentially, and a lot of the expense is to figure out how big, and under what circumstances, and in what locations. Its potential threat is pretty directly related to "global warming" and also to short-term local warming trends, but without regard to whether warming is human-caused. Studying the correlation could help ensure that preventative measures like spraying are done in areas where the expected weather forecast for the coming season is especially hospitable to mosquitoes. It's also worth studying what types of wildlife and livestock are affected.
HIV causes AIDS. However when that finding was originally challenged (*many* years ago), the challenge made a lot of sense, and wasn’t taken nearly as seriously as it should have been in most circles. Your claim that “Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis” are wildly outdated. No one who still questions the fact that HIV causes AIDS is a “scientist” of any sort. But there were a lot of real scientists who should have been ashamed of themselves for jumping so firmly to the conclusion that HIV causes AIDS, long before there was anything more than circumstantial evidence of this, and for arrogantly dismissing the very valid arguments which were initially advanced to point out that the connection/causality had yet to be scientifically proven.
While a lot of COPD is self-inflicted, not all of it is.
Nor does that account for those who are trying.
My f-i-l smoked for a while, not heavily and not long. He quit many years ago, but the damage was done and he is dying from emphysema.
So while it is true that it was self-inflicted, it isn’t like he didn’t do something about it. Besides, that was in the day when everyone was told that smoking didn’t harm anyone.
Sometimes people can be cut some slack.
The other thing is, the disparity between spending on COPD and other conditions, is way greater than can be justified, because even in many of those otehr conditions, cancer for example, much of that is self-inflicted through smoking, diet, lack of exercise, etc.
Making self-infliction a criteria for justifying spending is not good.
I’d hazard a guess that AIDS is far more self-inflicted than COPD.
GGG, please get a science education.
Sometime after WWII, someone either got bit by a monkey, ate a monkey or screwed a monkey with SIV (simian Immunodeficiency Virus). The virus mutated into HIV. That person infected others through sex. Back in the 70s , a gay flight attendant got it and spread it around the US. The promiscuous unprotected anal and oral sex of gays helped to quickly spread it. Later,drug addicts started getting it from sharing needles with infected gay addicts. In Africa, it was spread by heterosexual sex.
==HIV causes AIDS.
The scientific evidence points to other causes.
==Your claim that “Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis” are wildly outdated. No one who still questions the fact that HIV causes AIDS is a “scientist” of any sort.
You couldn’t be more wrong. The list of scientists and medical doctors who questin the HIV/AIDS hypothesis grows bigger with each passing day. These include Nobel Prize Winners, Lasker Prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, etc.
http://www.rethinkingaids.com/quotes/rethinkers.htm
==But there were a lot of real scientists who should have been ashamed of themselves for jumping so firmly to the conclusion that HIV causes AIDS
Agreed. And they should still feel ashamed of themselves, because the vast majority of the scientific evidence suggests that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Indeed, Duesberg et al’s predictions have virtually all come to pass, whereas the AIDS establishment predictions were wrong (and continue to be wrong) across the board.
Not necessarily. Though of course there are degrees of "self-inflicted". Only a very small percentage of COPD cases are caused by a genetic defect. Then there are some caused by occupational exposure, which in some cases the workers didn't realize carried a risk (in this country, at least, if they realized it, they could almost always have called OSHA and gotten the problem fixed, unless they were here illegally). The vast majority of people with COPD got it by smoking, while knowing full well that smoking carried a wide range of very serious health risks. A few got it from childhood exposure to parents who smoked heavily.
AIDS really has a pretty similar pattern, though probably somewhat more child-acquired-from-parent cases (even in the US) where babies were born with infections contracted from their mother. There are plenty of monogamous spouses who got it from their spouse -- some had no idea their spouse was sleeping with anyone else, much less any idea the spouse was HIV+; others fall into the "should have known" their spouse was putting them at risk category. A few people have gotten from being raped or from blood transfusions. But like COPD, the overwhelming majority got it by willfully engaging in unprotected and/or promiscuous sexual behavior that they knew full well carried a significant risk of contracting this deadly infection.
I think self-infliction is a very good criterion for justifying spending. Not just in health matters, but in all areas. I don't think we should be handing out food stamps and housing vouchers to people who are poor because they choose to play around instead of working. And I don't see why spending for healthcare or related research should be any different. Paying for self-inflicted conditions promotes a cultural idea that "you really couldn't help it", can't be expected to control yourself, and shouldn't have to suffer because you made dangerous choices that you knew full well were dangerous -- this promotes a cultural idea that we shouldn't be "judgemental" about such behavior, which leads to tacit acceptance of such behavior, which leads to a lot more people engaging in it. We're heading down a very slippery slope, with fully half the nation's healthcare spending being directly related to obesity and its predictable side effects. Most of this is public (tax) spending, and a huge amount is for people who have stuffed themselves into diabetes, then refused to manage their diabetes, and gone into kidney failure. Currently, kidney failure, regardless of cause, gets a person on full Medicare coverage for ALL their medical care (largely because kidney failure is so all-encompassing, that it's hard to classify other conditions as "unrelated"). The fact is that in many neighborhoods, the culture is now fully accepting of massive obesity, and fully accepting of massively obese parents giving even very young children virtually unlimited access to junk food. One reason it's so accepted is that these people don't literally end up either dying in gutters or bankrupting their families -- they end up getting all-encompassing taxpayer-paid medical care that many of their not-yet-in-kidney-failure friends and relatives are eager to get.
Of course, when it comes to paying for healthcare for an individual, the facts of how THAT person came to get a certain condition need to be paramount, regardless of how huge a percentage of people with the condition got it by self-infliction.
prostate cancer is also a slow progresser, meaning one could live a long time with it even without treatment, in many if not most cases...
It kills just as many men as breast cancer kills women.
I have been complaining of this for years to any and all who would listen. The problem is almost no one is listening.
Have you ever once heard this cost mentioned in all the talk of healthcare ‘reform?’ The statistics I have read are that AIDS costs est $340,000 per preson’s life in US.
AIDS is a wholly preventable disease unlike heart disease and diabetes. Yet all we ever hear about is how heart disease and diabetes are preventable. They aren’t.
The AIDS population is not heterosexuals. It is majority homosexual and minority iv drug users. It is basically a disease transmitted through anal sex. But no one is allowed to state this simple fact.
I agree with you on everything you said, except for what you implied causes AIDS. See my profile page for more. See especially the “Conservative Press” section... “The AIDS Catch” video is also quite good (a bit dated, but excellent nonetheless...they are the same people who aired “The Greate Global Warming Swindle). Finally, I think is high time that the American people forced their Reps to ask the AIDS establishment to explain how all Duesberg et al’s predictions were right, and to further explain why the AIDS establishment predictions were wrong across the board. All the best—GGG
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