[Luis Gonzalez]

A GLOBAL BATTLE: AIDS epidemic gains ground and victims

HIV invading more countries, infecting as many women as men

November 27, 2002

FREE PRESS NEWS SERVICES

LONDON -- For the first time since scientists discovered AIDS more than two decades ago, as many women as men are infected with HIV, a UN report says.

ALL ABOUT AIDS/HIV

The toll:

• Deaths: 24 million since 1981.

• Infected: By the end of this year, 42 million people globally will have HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. In 2002, 5 million people have been infected so far. The infection rate is one person for about every 143 people on Earth.

• Victims: Women make up half the epidemic. Some African countries report nearly 3 in 5 AIDS victims are women.

• Children orphaned: about 14 million.

• Worst case: South Africa has more people living with HIV and AIDS than any other country. Experts predict that India soon may overtake South Africa as the country with the most infected people.

  The facts:

• HIV is found in semen, blood, breast milk and other body fluids.

• Transmission occurs through sexual contact, blood transfusions, needle-sharing, from pregnant women to the fetus and through an infected mother nursing her baby.

• There is no known cure. Some drugs have prolonged the lives of victims in countries that can afford the medicines.

  Source: Reuters

Driving the increase among women is the explosive rise in heterosexual transmission in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said. An estimated 58 percent of HIV-infected adults in the region are women.

"The face of AIDS is clearly a female face in sub-Saharan Africa," said Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, known as UNAIDS. "We are far away from the gay white man disease it used to be in 1980s."

The global report, by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization, estimated that 42 million people have HIV or AIDS, that 5 million will be infected in 2002 and that 3.1 million will die of AIDS this year.

In the coming few years, according to the report, the death toll is expected to rise substantially unless health systems in the poor world are substantially improved and those living in poverty are given access to the life-extending anti-retroviral drugs.

Piot said heterosexual transmission is on the rise on every continent, posing a greater risk of rapidly spreading the disease simply because the population of heterosexuals with HIV is far larger than the population of gay men and intravenous-drug users.

The report found that the fastest-growing AIDS epidemic was in eastern Europe and the central Asian republics.

In some places that had almost no AIDS cases, the epidemic seemed to take root overnight. Uzbekistan, for instance, reported 620 new infections in the first six months of 2002, or six times the number of new infections from the same time period a year earlier.

In China, where AIDS was almost nonexistent a few years ago, there are now 1 million people with HIV.

But there are signs of hope. The report said prevention programs appear to be working in the areas where they have been set up.

Piot cited South Africa, where HIV infections among pregnant teenage girls fell 25 percent between 1998 and 2001. In Uganda, the number of new HIV infections has been dropping every year for the past 10 years, he said.

But the worst in sub-Saharan Africa still is coming. "The AIDS death toll on the continent is expected to continue rising, before peaking around the end of this decade," the report said. "This means that the worst of the epidemic's impact on those societies will be felt in the course of the next decade and beyond."

The report also highlights that 90 percent of Africans are not infected to illustrate that much is at stake in preventing the spread of AIDS.

[dsc]

"HIV invading more countries, infecting as many women as men"

Oh, the UN. Now there's a credible source.

This article alleges that 58% of the infected adults in *sub-Saharan Africa* are women. It doesn't tell us how death rates might have influenced that. It offers no figures for other regions. What a convenient oversight.

In Africa:

(a) there is no money to test even a fraction of the suspected AIDS cases, so doctors make diagnoses based solely on symptoms. However, those symptoms are the same as for other diseases endemic to the region. The more cases that are pronounced to be AIDS, the more money will be forthcoming from the civilized world. Try to imagine a universe in which these circumstances would not result in an artificial inflation in AIDS statistics.

(b) as I said before, heterosexual anal intercourse is a common birth-control measure in Africa. This means that many cases of "heterosexual" transmission cannot be charged off to normal sex.

(c) poor medical practices have infected many, and I know of no reason to think that this would not affect men and women in equal numbers--unless women are receiving more services than men.

(d) an African man who catches AIDS from taking it up the Hershey highway is unlikely to admit it, which also inflates "heterosexual" transmission numbers.

(e) of the women who caught it from men, the large majority caught it from drug users or bisexual men, and are unlikely to infect other men. This shows a link to SSAD, and and is also the factor that prevents an epidemic of heterosexual transmission.

The upshot is that the figures from Africa are inflated, and do not show that women are catching AIDS from normal intercourse in large numbers. I would expect the figures for women to be further inflated by the observed facts that men go to the doctor less often and would be less likely to acquiesce in an unsubstantiated diagnosis of AIDS. Masculine ego, you know.

The article also encourages you to infer that around half the infections in China and Uzbekistan resulted from normal heterosexual activity, but that isn't the case.

In most of the world, women who do not: 1. Use IV drugs; 2. Have sex with men who use IV drugs; or 3. Have sex with men who engage in sodomy with other men, are almost completely safe--with the exception of areas where medical practices aren't what they should be.

And, of course, a woman who allows a man to sodomize her after he has sodomized other women is also at a higher risk.

Women who refuse to allow anal sex are safer than either women or men who engage in it.

The incidence of F->M transmission through normal sex is extremely low, and the incidence of M->F transmission isn't much higher. Highly suspect figures from Africa notwithstanding, there isn't going to be any epidemic of AIDS caused by transmission through normal intercourse.