Today, The Independent runs a story with the headline:
Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits
The article covers how, despite predictions by the World Health Organization and UN Aids, that AIDS would become a world wide epidemic within the heterosexual population, it hasn’t. The one exception is in sub-Sahara Africa.
After admitting that AIDS cases have been exaggerated by organizations to induce higher funding levels, the article defends the funding saying that there is still much we don’t know about aids. It uses the sub-Saharan Africa area as an example of where the spread of AIDS is not full understood, even though it is admitted that the area has…
more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships
Still being stumped, the article closes by laying out the most perplexing of all AIDS issues:
The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?
The US is contributing and granting money to figure out why the AIDS problem is worse in DC than in North Dakota? You’re kidding right? How ’bout if we give them a hand?
According to the CDC, amongst males, 72% of AIDS cases are related to male to male sexual contact, 12% to injection drug use and 16% to high risk heterosexual contact (that is sex with a person know to or likely to have HIV). Further, 66% of AIDS cases are from either Hispanic or African American ethnicity.
OK, let’s look at North Dakota and Washington DC:
- According Gaydemographics.org, about 5% of DC’s population are same sex couples, .5% of ND’s couples are same sex. I think that’s 10X.
- According to the US Census, African Americans were 55% and totaled approximately 325,000 people in Washington DC. They accounted for about 1% and 6,500 of the North Dakota Population. That looks like 55X.
- According to the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration Treatment Data Statistics, for 2002, the most recent year statistics are available, North Dakota had 7 cases reported for heroin treatment. Washington DC had 2,218 reported. That looks like 317X.
Maybe it’s just me but one of those key factors sure seems to explain the 100X difference all by itself. I’ll bet smarter people than I could come up with multiple combinations of the above items for numerous other simple ways that WHO could have a reasonable answer for why Washington DC and North Dakota have a discrepancy of HIV cases.
To be sure, HIV/AIDS is a horrible disease and there are certainly cases where innocent victims i.e. children, transplant patients have contracted HIV/AIDS with no involvement on their part. However, 99%+ of the HIV/AIDS cases in the US are contracted as a result of an individual’s decisions. For WHO or any other organization to take another $.01, that could be used on cure research, to waste on inane research such as ND versus DC, is not only a blatant wast of resources but should be a personal insult to anyone desiring a cure for this disease.
I wonder how much of the nearly $3B that the US spent on research in FY2006 I could claim for that 10 minutes of research?
