Posted on 12/12/2004 7:42:49 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
This year, once again, the annual report from the Joint United Nations Program on H.I.V./AIDS and the World Health Organization tragically documents the way the global AIDS epidemic is still killing millions of people and spawning hot spots in Asia and Eastern Europe. The most striking news is that AIDS is fast becoming a disease that strikes younger women disproportionately. Ignorance is part of the problem, but the laws and social customs that keep women powerless and poor - and subject to sexual exploitation - are far more insidious.
According to the new report's eye-opening analysis, AIDS is spreading quickly into the ranks of women - both single and married - in regions where AIDS is already well established. In sub-Saharan Africa, women 15 to 24 years old are three times as likely to be infected as men the same age. In Thailand, 90 percent of AIDS transmissions a decade ago occurred between sex workers and their clients. More recent estimates suggest that 50 percent of the new infections are occurring between spouses, as men who picked up AIDS from prostitutes pass it on to their wives.
The soaring infection rates among younger women are driven partly by social customs that require the women to remain ignorant of sex and sexuality until they marry. Indeed, Unaids researchers have found that a majority of young women in some nations have no idea how to protect themselves from H.I.V. The root problem, especially in many developing nations, is a pervasive gender inequality that keeps women from amassing capital, asserting their rights under the law or even deciding when to have sex. A staggering number of women reported that their first sexual experiences came as a result of rape.
Marginalized in the economy and under the law, women in developing nations are often left with sex as their only marketable resource. In some parts of Africa, older men who take young lovers commonly help the girl's family by paying for school fees and food. Young women who are bartered this way have no standing to refuse sex or ask their partners to use condoms. Marriage and fidelity offer little protection from disease for these women, who typically marry older men who have been sexually active for decades. In some areas, infection rates for young married women who remain faithful are actually higher than for single women not yet in permanent relationships.
AIDS education is crucial in fighting the epidemic. But information alone is not enough. Countries with entrenched epidemics need to enhance women's rights under the law and end retrograde traditions that make them second-class citizens. Only then can women hope to protect themselves.
...they all seem to come out of the woodwork when the word "sex" is involved...
Missed that one. Sounds like a dummazz.
They must have had fun writing this one. They throw everything but the leftist kitchen sink in assigning blame. I can't believe they deride, with a straight face, men who take young wives.
Sorry, but as with almost all AIDS hype, this sounds like BS intended to get more $$$ for those who've made AIDS their career. It also is intended to lessen the stigma for homosexuals.
The above claim, for example is not credible. If "sex workers" were transmitting the disease a decade ago, how come men only started passing it along to their wives recently?
There is more disinformation surrounding this disease than truth.
Based on actual testing for HIV? Or estimated from doctors' diagnoses based on a disease like tuberculosis presumed to have resulted because the patient was infected?
So you're saying that HIV is smaller than a molecule of water, and smaller than a molecule of O2? Because a quality latex condom will hold both water and air under pressure.
No it doesn't. The best search engine is Google. Try Google Images for AIDS or HIV and see what you come up with. Answer: Nothing.
If you have links to images of the virus (photos not drawings) then simply post them. Telling us that we can easily find them is not enough for this forum.
I did google HIV, I came up with, in image search, the nice soccer ball shaped protein coating with the receptors on its surface that is HIV.
Thanks for playing.
Yeah, he was.
And Interceptpoint seems to think he knows what the troll was getting at and is trying to correct me.
*Snort*
Wrong.
Ha
That's what I said.
;-)
Welcome to the liberal media.
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=img&cs=utf8&q=%22HIV%22&rys=0&itag=crv
The link I posted to the lying sack of garbage troll MikeKen was stated to be an infographic, nice slap there about 'drawings.'
MikeKen said that AIDS and HIV are a hoax, and that HIV has never been isolated.
Funny, we know what it looks like and we know what protein receptors it has on its surface.
Image links:
What HIV does to red blood cells:
http://www.csend.hu/magazin/0102/hiv2.jpg
HIV attacking an immune system cell:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39909000/jpg/_39909923_cell203.jpg
HIV attacking yet another cell:
http://solair.eunet.yu/~yod/HIV.jpg
HIV budding out of an infected cell:
http://bioweb.wku.edu/courses/biol115/wyatt/Micro/HIV_budding.jpg
Oh gee, check that out:
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/upload/images/36/hiv-1%20large.jpg
Infected Lymph tissue:
http://immuneweb.xxmc.edu.cn/pic/HIV%20Infection%20in%20Human%20Lymph%20Tissue.jpg
http://immuneweb.xxmc.edu.cn/pic/HIV%20Infection%20in%20Human%20Lymph%20Tissue%203.jpg
http://immuneweb.xxmc.edu.cn/pic/HIV%20Infection%20in%20Human%20Lymph%20Tissue%202.jpg
Hmmm:
http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/gene-web/Lentiviral/HIV.jpg
Oh really? Please explain how two people, each without AIDS, who remain virgins until they wed, then remain faithful to each other throughout their marriage, could sexually contract AIDS from someone else.
Abstinence followed by faithfulness is 100% effective.
Sharing a needle with someone who has AIDS for one. Receiving a transfusion with infected blood for another. Accidentally pricking yourself with a needle used for drawing blood from an infected individual for a third. Getting into a fight with an HIV positive individual where blood is drawn. Should I continue?
Need a sexual method? Having sex with a spouse who has contracted AIDS, after marriage, in any of the manners described above, although heterosexual transmission is very difficult without sores or rough anal penetration.
And all of those are relatively rare exceptions, which would be noted by the couple as putting them at potential risk, and thus resulting in their testing or adopting additional precautions.
So amend my statement to: Abstinence combined with faithfulness is 99.95% effective against AIDS.
Actually there are a lot of people who believe this so MikeKen has lots of support for his position.
In my case I am still waiting for someone to provide a link to the definitive medical journal article that establishes the causality HIV=AIDS. Just because AIDS exists (no question about that) is not proof that it is caused by HIV. I take it as unproven until there is better data than I have been able to dig up. Just showing a photo of a virus or retrovirus doesn't prove that it is the cause of anything. You have to be able to apply Koch's Postulates and prove it the old fashioned way.
In fact, the odds of a middle class woman getting AIDS from a randomly selected middle class man off the street are much smaller than 00.05% but I doubt you'd know that. The odds for a man are even smaller.
Fact is, the spread of AIDS among middle-class, heterosexuals was so lied about in the early ninties, that there is almost no factual information now circulating among the general populace. According to projections, we should have had tens of millions of deaths by now. Of course we haven't, and the CDC knew we wouldn't but perpetuated the lie.
I grew up in New Jersey and every little kid heard stories about the Jersey Devil. Those stories had about as much truth as we get about AIDS.
"Actually there are a lot of people who believe this so MikeKen has lots of support for his position."
And every single one of the people I've personally run across that believed that HAD AIDS/HIV and wanted to spread the joy.
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