"Republicans were responsible for the spread of AIDS/HIV"
Posted on 05/01/2005 9:04:33 AM PDT by csvset
Health officials have worried for years about the high rate of HIV among African Americans. Now the federal Centers for Disease Control is examining how one group, known as men on the "down low," could be spreading the disease among black women.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
How anyone in this day and age, in America, doesn't either triple condom or keep it zipped I don't know.
I know, denial. If I don't use a condom, I'm not really gay?
That's frightening.
Not all will be monogamous certainly, but neither will all heteros, I'm afraid.
(Yes, I knew you were being sarcastic.)
"Andre Robinson of the Black Coalition on AIDS, a San Francisco outreach program. [said]"...If these men were the bridge, then why didn't this happen in the '80s?"
I think he makes a good point.
(cough, cough) Fifty Cent (cough, cough).
Too bad stupidity isn't illegal! Wouldn't that solve a lot!
There was a good SVU episode with Ice-T explaining "the down low." Pretty funny when he did it, although deadly serious.
That was a hysterical episode, about the football player and his "poker buddies."
Now there's an ugly disease, federal expenditures. It seems that there isn't a cure for it.
But, ofcourse, they want you to believe there is this large, unknown percentage of gay black men to further their claims that a huge chunk of us are gay.
It has long been my thesis that as data collection becomes more comprehensive and provides easier analysis for things like credit risk, criminal prevalence, diseases, fraud rates, etc. that the picture will emerge of subgroups in the population that are so different from the norm - which foist such massive costs on the rest of the population - that when the full magnitude of it is known there will be political support for efforts to allow discrimination in matters like auto insurance, etc.
If for instance, it was known that loss rates for one ethnic group of drivers were in the same proportion as the HIV+ rates quoted above (58.2/2.9=20x) would people support a surcharge on a group which cost an insurance program 20x as much as the rest of that segment? I think so. The reason that there hasn't been support for this to date is that the information has not been available. I'm sure insurance companies run and hide from the issue - but at some point they may be required to publicly disclose the segments of the insured population that are driving costs out of control. It may not be segmentation based on race - but with numbers like above, I cannot image a segmentation scheme that would drive the numbers any higher, except maybe geographic sub segments (e.g., black women in the SF area - has to be a shocking rate).
What's the rate of IV drug use in these groups?
You don't say?
It didn't happen in the '80's? I remember one of the AIDS jokes going around back then:
Q. What's the toughest part about finding out you have AIDS?
A. Trying to convince your mother you're black.
So why were the two largest populations of HIV+ blacks and gays back then (which is what made the joke funny at the time)? Perhaps because there was significant overlap?
They still are about 94% OF THE TOTAL AIDS CASES, nothing has really changed.
That AIDS Initiative was passed in 1998, from these new numbers you can see what good it did. I'd say it needs more money. How about an even $500 million this time, that should do it.
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