A new report by epidemiologists at the WHO concludes that AIDS was never a really big threat to the heterosexual community outside of Africa, and it was really overblown.
Gee, no kidding. It would have been nice if they'd figured that out back in 1989, when conservatives were called bigots for arguing that the homosexual community needed to change its practices.
Instead, posters and ad campaigns saying, "This is the face of AIDS", showing everybody BUT gay men, started running, scaring everybody. And we should be scared of STD's, it's just that AIDS was and always will be in North America primarily in the high risk groups: homosexuals, IV drug users, and prostitutes.
But because they focused so much on heterosexuals for political reasons (mostly to drum up research dollars), they minimized the risk to homosexuals, so much so that now behaviour in many homosexual enclaves has become as risky as it was back in the early 80s. It's just ridiculous. If they had focused mostly on gay men to begin with, they potentially could have saved a lot of lives. The simple fact is that the type of activity that gay men are engaged in is a more efficient spreader of the virus than heterosexual activity. But you're not allowed to say that because it would be discriminatory to state the truth!
But the report is worse than that. After making sweeping statements like this:
Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.
They then say this:
Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.
How does abstinence programs hurt AIDS prevention? For pity's sake, Uganda, the only nation that has embraced abstinence totally, has seen its AIDS rates plummet. But it's not politically correct to advance abstinence, so they're not.
So this article now admits that they were wrong to focus on heterosexuals, a choice made primarily out of political correctness back in the 1990s. But they continue to make a politically correct choice today, even though the data contradicts it. This drives me batty!
In Kenya, health workers try to teach abstinence and monogamy (still a big problem because many men are polygamous). That's the key to minimizing the disease, in the same way that it has been minimized here. I wish people would see that!
A great book on the subject of how AIDS education was politicized to the detriment of female college students and homosexuals is Unprotected. You really need to check it out!
Read more of my columns that focus on the insanity of current public health sex education. Start here and then go here.
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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