Originally posted by Beowulf:And the suggestion that is it primarily a "gay" disease is strictly due to a common misconception that resulted from many of the first cases being reported in the gay community.
If you take a jaunt over to Africa, it is decimating heterosexual men and women. I beleive I recall reading that homosexuality is far less common there. If this were a "fag killer" as many bible thumping firebrands tell us, why would it be killing so many non-homosexual Africans?
Maybe God is like George Bush and hates black people.
That is why I specifically stated modernized countries, not third world countries where basic standards of living are at the heart of the many of the reasons for the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus due to extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure to properly support human life. That is another discussion altogether and I'm not prepped to discuss that issue in length at the moment unfortunately.
I will say that if you check the CDC's data on the actual confirmed number of AIDS cases in Africa, it is dramatically lower than what you hear in the news, and many of the symptoms associated and assumed to be AIDS related in Africa are in fact the very same symptoms of many of the diseases that extremely poor third world nations struggle with. Tuberculosis, hepatitis, other STD's, etc., have extremely similar disease patterns from a sympomatic standpoint to the HIV/AIDS virus and given the widespread issues of clean water, sewage removal, shared living arrangements, lack of medicines, etc., that Africa struggles with, the AIDS virus is often assumed to be the cause of sickness and death, but there is no way of determining whether or not this was in fact the case. Recent studies funded to provide data for these assertions have indicated that the AIDS epidemic, while extremely important to address in Africa, may be wildly overestimated in this respect. My point here is don't believe everything you hear, look to the actual factual evidence as provided by the NIH and the CDC and you'll see quite a different picture. Once again, I'm not saying we should table efforts to find a vaccine and to eliminate the HIV/AIDS virus, it will be a joyful day for many when this occurs, but we need to keep perspective and take a hard look at the facts surrounding these matters.
