AIDS and gay activists in the US have expressed dismay at the appointment of an evangelical Christian who, it is alleged, calls being gay a "deathstyle" to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS (PACHA).
The views of Thacker on HIV prevention have also caused concern. He is an advocate of the abstinence-only policy currently favoured by the Bush administration which says that sexual abstinence is the only sure way to prevent HIV, and does not mention condoms as an effective way of preventing HIV.
"We find him frightening", said David Smith, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay rights organisation in the USA, on Thacker's appointment, adding that it was evidence that the Bush White House "is focusing on ideology not science when it comes to AIDS."
Scepter Institute - About the Founder How could it be? Jerry and Sue were committed Christians. They had been faithful to each other throughout their 14 years of marriage. They should never have been at risk for the disease. Then they remembered Sue's third pregnancy. The delivery had required a blood transfusion -- blood that investigators would later discover was tainted. Sue contracted HIV in the hospital. Jerry got the virus from Sue. The daughter born in that difficult delivery would later test positive for HIV, as well.
Sexual Abstinence Behind Uganda's AIDS Success Story Nairobi, Kenya (CNSNews.com) - Some experts say the dramatic drop in HIV/AIDS infections in Uganda is proof that abstinence from sex is the best way to combat the deadly disease, especially in the world's hardest-hit area, sub-Saharan Africa.
Demand O'Reilly, Fox not silence Stephen Bennett As if Bill O'Reilly's on-air bludgeoning of Stephen Bennett wasn't enough, Fox News now is threatening a lawsuit to silence the truth and scuttle a much-needed ministry that helps homosexuals.
Citizens Against Government Waste
Since the first federal resources were made available to state and local health agencies for AIDS prevention in 1985, federal funding, which now includes money for research, treatment, and housing, has skyrocketed to $13 billion for fiscal 2003. As a result of the work of highly mobilized lobbying forces, more is spent per patient on AIDS than on any other disease, though it does not even currently rank among the top 15 causes of death in the United States. In one year, 1998, heart disease, the nation's leading cause of death, killed 724,859 Americans only 6.8 percent less than the 774,767 who have contracted AIDS in the last 20 years.2 Of those 774,767 total AIDS cases, 462,766 have died. During that same period, 14 million Americans 30 times more have died of heart disease.
Research expenditures at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) demonstrate the uneven use of federal resources. In 1996, NIH spent an average of $1,160 for every heart disease death, $4,700 for every cancer death, and a whopping $43,000 for every AIDS death.3 Even though they get far less research money, that year heart disease killed 24 times more and cancer killed 17 times more than the number of people who died from AIDS in 1996, when AIDS was still the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
In addition to research, the U.S. government spends large amounts on AIDS prevention and social programs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent $795 million on prevention in fiscal 2001. But questions have arisen regarding the misuse of some of that money.
HIV and AIDS prevention and social programs have long been cash cows for politically correct nonprofit firms and government bureaucracies. In their book, Private Choices and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic in an Economic Perspective, University of Chicago economist Tomas J. Philipson and law professor Richard A. Posner concluded that the AIDS epidemic has been overstated in almost every imaginable way in order to gain more funding. They contended, "pressure from small, but organized, groups [including] male homosexuals, health professionals, government bureaucrats, and moral conservatives has deflected AIDS programs from their efficient path."9
In 1998, heart disease 118,151 people under the age of 65.24 Cancer killed 157,255 people under age 65 that year.25 That is nine times more and 13 times more, respectively, than AIDS, which killed approximately 12,000 people under age 65 in 1998.26 In all age groups, including the under 65 group, the death rates for heart disease and cancer have remained steady while AIDS deaths have been in decline since 1993. Furthermore, a typical AIDS case costs approximately the same amount to treat as a terminal cancer case approximately $40,000 to $50,000 per year.27
In 1998, AIDS ranked 17th in the leading causes of death among Americans, behind, among others, heart disease, cancer, emphysema and asthma, pneumonia and influenza, diabetes, suicide, Alzheimer's disease, homicide, and hypertension.28 Despite this, AIDS receives more funding than any other disease. In 1996, NIH spent 43 times more on AIDS than it did on heart disease and nine times more than it spent on all cancers.29
Some AIDS activists think it could be detrimental that AIDS receives much more money than other diseases. Martin Delaney, founder of the HIV treatment information organization Project Inform says that by giving AIDS so much funding, the federal government makes it "almost an advantage to be HIV-positive."30
After SFDPH worker Seth Watkins admitted in an August 2001 New York Times article that he sometimes went to San Francisco bars and ended up having unprotected sex, Tierney did not reprimand him. Instead Tierney, told The San Francisco Chronicle that his employee's sex life was that employee's business.57 Watkins is not the only AIDS prevention worker under scrutiny for such behavior. In 1999, Luis Diaz, director of the HIV and AIDS program for the Nevada Association of Latin Americans was accused of having unprotected sex with two people without informing them of his AIDS infection.
There are AIDS prevention success stories, but they aren't coming from American "health" organizations like SFDPH. In the 1990s, the prevalence of AIDS in Uganda hung around the 30 percent mark. Today only 6 percent of Ugandans have AIDS. A recent Africa News article says the Ugandan government attributes this drop to programs like the School Health Education Project, which, instead of sex and flirting seminars, include discussion and debate on the reality of living with AIDS. The article says, "More emphasis [is] put on the fact that HIV/AIDS has no cure and that abstinence from sex [is] the best way to avoid the pandemic."59
Upon her retirement as Director of the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention at CDC, Dr. Helene Gayle said of her progress, "Nearly every adult can tell you what AIDS is and how it is spread." Adult prevention and education programs are wasted in well-educated, urban populations that glamorize the behavior that spreads the disease.
America is at war against AIDS and against terrorism. The waste of federal AIDS dollars does a disservice to taxpayers, and most importantly, to the victims and those at risk of contracting the disease. The nation cannot be expected to win those wars unless it gets serious about eliminating wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive AIDS programs.
Need for Sustained HIV Prevention Among Men who Have Sex with Men In the United States, HIV-related illness and death historically have had a tremendous impact on men who have sex with men (MSM). Even though the toll of the epidemic among injection drug users (IDUs) and heterosexuals has increased during the last decade, MSM continue to account for the largest number of people reported with AIDS each year. In 2000 alone, 13,562 AIDS cases were reported among MSM, compared with 8,531 among IDUs and 6,530 among men and women who acquired HIV heterosexually.
Overall, the number of MSM of all races and ethnicities who are living with AIDS has increased steadily, partly as a result of the 1993 expanded AIDS case definition and, more recently, of improved survival.
Abundant evidence shows a need to sustain prevention efforts for each generation of young gay and bisexual men. We cannot assume that the positive attitudinal and behavioral change seen among older men also applies to younger men. Recent data on HIV prevalence and risk behaviors suggest that young gay and bisexual men continue to place themselves at considerable risk for HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
These data highlight the need to design more effective prevention efforts for gay and bisexual men of color. The involvement of community and opinion leaders in prevention efforts will be critical for overcoming cultural barriers to prevention, including homophobia. For example, there remains a tremendous stigma to acknowledging gay and bisexual activity in African American and Hispanic communities. Need to Combat Other STDs
Studies among MSM who are treated in STD clinics have shown consistently high percentages of HIV infection, ranging from nearly 4% in Seattle to a high of almost 36% in Atlanta. (See CDC's National HIV Prevalence Surveys, 1997 Summary, Table 1.) Some studies have shown that the likelihood of both acquiring and spreading HIV is 2-5 times greater in people with STDs, and that aggressively treating STDs in a community may help to reduce the rate of new HIV infections. Along with prompt attention to and treatment of STDs, efforts to reduce the behaviors that spread STDs are critical.
Syphilis outbreak among L.A. gay men in 2002 leads to calls for more testing
Yeah, more should be done, such as taking them out and shooting them for spreading a deadly disease intentionally. I have always believed that homosexuality is nothing more than mental illness (as well as spiritual) and a death wish.
It seriously adds significant new revelations and concomitant considerations as to the whys and wherefores our ubermenschen (even after Malthusian thinking, which had been reaccepted amongst elitists in the 1960s, was discredited) went on to foster a radical shift away from American culture's principal paradigm: unquestioned protection for innocent human life.
What this suggests is that there is also heightened sexual gratification derived from seeing played out on a world scale what I've previously called Malthusian driven Megalomaniacal Misanthropy. The power to act as God in first deciding the "altruistic" need to thin the human "herd," and finally in seeing ones wishes carried out by various and sundry means on a world scale, may very well have a sexual component.
If true, it gives those of us who have always had, and those who are about to gain, a love for God as savior, a whole new perspective as to why wholesome sex has always been associated with life (and religion), and unwholesome sex -- as depicted in the bible with the Sodom and Gemorrah story -- has always been associated with death (and hatred of God).
Take this concept with you as you battle the anti-God forces who are striving to thoroughly secularize America by removing God from the public square.
Those of you who feel I'm stretching too much from this piece, please explain. For instance, the gratification from the sexual escapade depicted here is from a one-on-one encounter. It may not be plausible that powerful people can get off on a grander scale when large scale killings are carried out by their proxies and not by them directly. But is it possible? I doubt it is possible to do a double blind study of megalomaniacs to arrive at a scientific test to my hypothesis. Don't we only have indirect evidence?
If my suspicions have valid grounds, it gives each of you a new personal power in protecting your interests. Isn't that worth your further consideration? Maybe not.