Posted on 12/01/2005 1:34:51 AM PST by neverdem
I don't think so. Here is a quote from the NIAIDS fact sheet The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS:
MYTH: There is no AIDS in Africa. AIDS is nothing more than a new name for old diseases.
FACT: The diseases that have come to be associated with AIDS in Africa - such as wasting syndrome, diarrheal diseases and TB - have long been severe burdens there. However, high rates of mortality from these diseases, formerly confined to the elderly and malnourished, are now common among HIV-infected young and middle-aged people, including well-educated members of the middle class (UNAIDS, 2000).
For example, in a study in Cote d'Ivoire, HIV-seropositive individuals with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) were 17 times more likely to die within six months than HIV-seronegative individuals with pulmonary TB (Ackah et al. Lancet 1995; 345:607). In Malawi, mortality over three years among children who had received recommended childhood immunizations and who survived the first year of life was 9.5 times higher among HIV-seropositive children than among HIV-seronegative children. The leading causes of death were wasting and respiratory conditions (Taha et al. Pediatr Infect Dis J 1999;18:689). Elsewhere in Africa, findings are similar.
If you don't care about the innocent, that's your choice. Buying and distributing anti-retroviral drugs doesn't do anything else except prevent the opportunistic infections that kill folks with AIDS.
Most AIDS in Africa is not AIDS. In the rest of the world the cause of AIDS is always the same, association with those who practice homosexual behavior and/or loose sexual practices.
Contiminated medical equipment, intravenous drug abuse, heterosexual promiscuity and heterosexual prostitution are fairly common reasons in the rest of the world for people who trust their spouses becoming infected.
Now if the rest of the world wants to die of AIDS that is their business, not mine. In the USA AIDS is more correctly called GRIDS. It's a gay disease.
Tell that to the women who contract HIV/AIDS, and the kids born with it. If you were a doctor, wouldn't it be fun to treat those women who trusted their spouses and kids born with it? That's what I'm talking about.
Which chart from the link in comment 10? Being HIV positive is different from diagnosed with an AIDS defining illness or fulfilling specific lab criteria to be diagnosed as an AIDS patient. If you're not impressed with the numbers, so be it. With average lifetime cost estimated at $200,000 per AIDS patient, and the true prevalence of HIV still unknown in the USA, IIRC, only the U.S. Armed Forces has mandatory testing, I'm impressed by the tragedy and the cost.
Now where did those women's partners get the disease? I'd guess that in 90% of cases, from 'gay' practices. and in the rest from IV drug use. So if these women didn't associate with those people they'd be healthy.
Secondly, how many of these women are married to their partners. I'd hazard a guess that the number of women infected by a cheating husband (who should be executed BTW) is totally insignificant in comaprison to the number of women who got it while sleeping around.
The bottom line remians the same. GRIDS is a gay disease and you get it from associating with "gays". Second bottom line: Immorality Kills
As a basis for a public health strategy, that has only limited effectiveness. Among the ignorant, it offers nothing. Do you have any other ideas that have a chance to protect the innocent?
Sure. Tell them not to associate with homosexuals and not to practice premarital sex and to remain faithfully monogamous during marriage and they haev nothing to worry about. This isn't rocket science after all
That message is not getting through to lower the number of new cases of AIDS below 40,000 each year. The number seems to be getting larger.
It's not just gay blades. Many innocent folks are infected because of others who could care less. It costs third party payors, including the gov't, at least $200,000 for each new diagnosis of AIDS according to this New England Journal of Medicine editorial. With an approximately 50% divorce rate and a solid rate of intravenous drug abuse, what else can you offer?
So how manu of these cases each year are either people who practice homosexual behavior or associate with those who do or who do iv drugs or associate with those who do? 99.9% I'd guess.
The correct answer to the cost of each diagnosis ($200K) is that this is a voluntary disease and we should just let it die out. Why should we pay for someone's medical care when they choose to get this disease by their actions. We shouldn't.
Sure, it's 99.9% in this country, but it's mostly heterosexually transmitted in the rest of the world. /sarcasm
CDC's numbers for this country were linked already.
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