Posted on 04/21/2008 4:00:31 PM PDT by wagglebee
Another thing that strikes me by the comparison is that when a person gets lung cancer, people ask if they were a smoker, and no one thinks anything of the question. When a person gets AIDS, if you ask what risk factors may have contributed, you’ll hear the indignant answer, “what difference does it make?”
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats/hasr1302.pdf guess who is giving it to who,vaginal sex has an odds of transmission of
1 in 5,000,000, while msm odds are 1 in 1000
Please provide some honest, realistic odds on a 100 percent heterosexual male contracting AIDS from a female by engaging in “traditional” (i.e., non-anal) intercourse—and I’m talking one-in-??? numbers. I am led to believe that a very low percentage of U.S. AIDS patients are women, and most of those are prostitutes or intravenous drug users. Assuming one exercises reasonable discretion in one’s choice of partners, the risk of infection has got to be slim. But I’m so confused by the subject
The following numbers are old, and they’re all pretty much guesswork anyway, so take them with a grain of salt. But I venture to say most people in the field would agree with my conclusions.
According to a report by researchers Norman Hearst and Stephen Hulley in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the odds of a heterosexual becoming infected with AIDS after one episode of penile-vaginal intercourse with someone in a non-high-risk group without a condom are one in 5 million. With a condom it’s even safer—one in 50 million. Just to put this in perspective, the chances of someone in your family getting injured next year in a bubble bath are 1 in 1.3 million (source: The Odds on Virtually Everything, Heron House, 1980). You’re in much greater danger of being struck by lightning (1 in 600,000), having your house bombed (1 in 290,000), or being murdered (1 in 11,000).
The numbers get a lot worse if you engage in “high-risk behavior”—having sexual intercourse or sharing needles with a member of a high-risk group, e.g., a gay or bisexual male or IV drug user from a major metro area, or a hemophiliac. The chances of getting AIDS from one such encounter range as high as 1 in 10,000 using a condom to 1 in 1,000 unprotected. Even if your partner tests negative for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the chances of infection from a high-risk person are still relatively high—1 in 50,000 without a condom. That’s because there’s a 45 to 90 day window during which a newly infected person can infect others but test negative. (A few people go as long as 180 days.)
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