Posted on 10/27/2001 9:53:27 AM PDT by Senator Pardek
If I ever decide I need to get blood from a turnip, I’m calling on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and their friends in the media.
Why? For almost fifteen years now they have performed the incredible feat of exaggerating the AIDS epidemic in every possible way, to make it more politically correct and bring more money into federal health agency coffers.
No matter how overblown their previous predictions and assertions prove, no matter how good the news to the contrary, they always find a way to make the end of the world seem just around the corner.
Consider the following August headlines: “U.S. AIDS Findings Cause Concern” (Associated Press); “AIDS Maintaining Its Grip in U.S.” (San Francisco Chronicle); “Ill Omen: Decline of AIDS Levels Off” (Atlanta Journal and Constitution); “Resurgence Feared After Drop in AIDS Deaths” (USA Today); “A ‘Chilling Portrait’ of Failure to Prevent AIDS” (Los Angeles Times).
What you should have read was that the American AIDS epidemic is over.
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| "This epidemic is no more! It has ceased to be! This . . . is an ex-epidemic!" | |
That’s right. To paraphrase a famous Monty Python sketch, “This epidemic is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late epidemic. It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This . . . is an ex-epidemic!”
By the modern definition, an epidemic is a disease that surpasses an expected level of cases for a certain length of time. Since previously there were no reported AIDS cases, AIDS certainly qualified as an epidemic from 1981. In 1993 it peaked at 106,000 new cases, then declined yearly, and has now leveled off at a considerably lower rate of about 40,000 cases a year. AIDS is still with us, but it is epidemic no more.
Obviously we’re still getting 40,000 more cases yearly than we’d like. But it’s a safe bet that diseases without a cure that are spread and contracted overwhelmingly by people who put themselves knowingly at risk will continue to persist.
And here’s some good news that anyone can access in the just-released CDC HIV/AIDS annual report (available at: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats/hasr1202.htm), but that nobody in the media has bothered to tell you:
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| Helene Gayle's six years of AIDS political correctness has landed her a cushy job with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. | |
What about this talk of resurgence? In August, the outgoing director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention, Helene Gayle, told reporters that infections in heterosexual women are increasing more rapidly than any other group. But the CDC’s numbers show reported female HIV infections attributed to heterosexual contact declined slightly last year, from 2,506 to 2,448. Female AIDS cases attributed to heterosexual contact declined from 4,281 to 3,981, down in turn from 6,253 in 1993. When a decline is the “most rapid” area of growth, how bad can things be?
Gayle also cited studies indicating that young homosexual males are showing a clear increase in risky behavior. Yet even this bad news is the inevitable result of good news-wisely or not, people are making risk-benefit decisions based on the availability of new therapies. While those drugs have not yet made full-blown AIDS a controllable condition like diabetes, it appears they have done so with HIV infection. Seen Magic Johnson lately? A decade after his diagnosis he’s become a bit pudgy, but otherwise seems no worse for the wear. (LOL - Pardek)
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| A decade since his HIV diagnosis, Magic Johnson is pudgy but otherwise healthy. | |
Would-be risk-takers probably should think a bit harder about the tremendous costs and sometimes serious side effects of anti-HIV medicines. But they’re apparently assuming that with new therapies coming out all the time, they probably will never get AIDS. And they’re probably right. (For her dedication in providing such useful information for the past six years, Gayle has now been hired by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to direct their AIDS funding activities.)
You CAN find bad news in the CDC report. For example, every year minorities constitute a greater share of the AIDS reaper’s victims. Blacks have about ten times the AIDS rate of whites, Hispanics four times. The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, published eleven years ago. In a book that many stores and one giant chain resolutely refused to stock, I detailed the obsession with portraying the disease as one of heterosexual middle-class whites, and the deadly disinformation spread by politically-correct slogans such as “Everyone’s at Risk” and “AIDS Is an Equal Opportunity Destroyer.”
“To the extent (government and the media) failed to give minorities much-needed extra attention, they left them in the back of the bus-or the back of a hearse,” I wrote.
I was right. But forgive me if I don’t feel like gloating.
Michael Fumento has written extensively on AIDS, including his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS. Read an excerpt from the book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Exploding Myths (National Review, December 13, 1993), as well as his other AIDS work.
You have done the world a favor!
</sarcasm>
His best title for one of those articles was "Gulf Lore Syndrome".
When it's the Government, there's no problem because they have Zero Funding to fix the situation, or are unable to solve this situation.
When it's a private company, no amount of money is too much to spend to hire the lawyers, pay the EPA's fine, and other 'Green' clean up teams.
How many hundreds of thousands of homosexuals died unnecessarily because their lives were sacrificed on the altars of political correctness and the radical gay agenda?
I remember in the early 80s, when Diane Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco, and she tried to close down the notorious bath-houses. In fact, this was before they even called it AIDS (GID, gay immune disease, or something like that). Many early cases of AIDS had been traced to the ferociously promiscuous anal sex scene in the bath-houses, and DiFi (for once doing the right thing) tried to close them as a matter of public health. The radical sodomites threw a fit, accusing her and the SF City Council of "stigmatizing" them. So the City Council backed down in the crucial early stages of the plague. This awakened gay activists to the political clout they could gain though playing to ignorant sympathies. After this, the possibility of an AIDS quarantine was never seriously discussed.
Meanwhile, AIDS raged on, and homosexuals died miserably by the hundreds of thousands.
My cousin was at UCSF medschool in '85 and '86, right at the epicenter. We had a conversation just after Rock Hudson died, and he told me back then that there wasn't going to be a heterosexual epidemic. Anal sex was paritcularly suited to the transmission of AIDS, followed by IV drug use. And he's a pro-Gay Rights Democrat!
Everything that we've "learned" about AIDS in the last 5 to 10 years, everything that Michael Fumento has ever written on the subject-- no heterosexual plague, etc.-- ALL of that was known or strongly suspected all the way back in the mid-80s!
How many have died in this country and around the world, because of the gay rights agenda?
This plague could have easily been stopped, if the truth had been told early on and if proper steps had been taken to treat this like any other lethal infectious disease.
Ya know what? It never came arrived.
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