[Billthedrill]

Medical epidemiology is not meant to be a political tool. Its purpose is to tell us the extent of sickness and death from a given cause and to define the risks. If homosexuals are the prime risk group, that fact must be stated as plainly as saying that only infants get SIDS and that runners and other athletes are the prime risk group for shin splints.

Hear, hear! A hundred years from now when the political enthusiasts are all dead sane people will be shaking their heads at how politics killed the people it was supposedly protecting.

We all are, to an extent, at risk when a disease of this sort is running rampant, but not nearly to the extent that hysteria would have it. Such things as rape and contamination of blood supplies do not care about the sexual practices of the victim.

But the idea that everyone was equally at risk served only to avoid the notion that passive anal intercourse was the primary vector and male homosexuals the primary (but not exclusive) practitioners. What was plainly at stake were at least three factors - (1) that funding for a disease restricted to an ostracized social group would not be minimized because of the ostracization; (2) that actions intended to prevent the spread of the disease would not be disproportionately aimed at that group, and (3) that the blame for a disease turning into an epidemic would be deflected from that group.

In fact, (1) funding was, in the end, disproportionately and not altogether effectively large for this disease, (2) the bath-houses were not closed until much later and such common public health measures as vector tracking and quarantine were not employed, and (3) the blame for the spread of the disease could not be masked, clouded, or deflected. Fumento's point, and I wholeheartedly concur, is that homosexual men were the ones who paid dearly for this triumph of politics over common sense and good medical procedure. Blaming the thing on Reagan or the conservatives simply is an aging myth that serves only to propagate the misery.

[Strategerist]

Interestingly, though, a lot of religious fundie types eagerly got on the "everyone is at risk" AIDS bandwagon themselves, because they wanted to terrorize people out of ALL sex outside of marriage.

So it had support from both ends of the political spectrum.

The reality is that a man even having completely unprotected vaginal sex with a dozen new women every night, if he's avoiding women with obvious needle track marks, etc., is exceedingly unlikely to ever contract AIDS.