it is intended as satire.
In the third paragraph the author says, "Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match."
Huh? There is nothing more risky in the world of HIV that being mutually monogamous with a HIV positive partner. The UCSF Safer-Sex Methods Report ( http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/InSite?page=kb-07-02-02 ) says, "Current research has shifted emphasis from an explicit concern with absolute numbers of sexual partners to a model that situates an individual's selection of sexual partners in the context of the population seroprevalence, the likelihood that an individual has been tested for HIV, the likelihood that the test result was accurate, the likelihood of infection through insertive or receptive oral, vaginal, or anal sex, and the degree to which condom use reduces the probability of transmission during these acts. The model shows that individuals can reduce their risk by choosing a partner who has tested HIV negative, choosing a safer-sex act, using a condom, or some combination of these factors."
So many factors go into determining HIV risk that the simple minded statement that promiscuous potential sex partners put you at more risk than less promiscuous ones simple boggles my mind.
Much of the rest of the article builds from that false assumption and therefore has no validity. I should probably quit, but so much of the rest is so ill-informed that I can't resist sputtering some more.
Later on the article says, "If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those conditions, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease to the men; and the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives was willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might die out along with it."
Huh? This is ridiculous.
"Before long, the prostitutes are infected"? Who infected the prostitutes? Was it God because of their sins? If the men are initially disease free they can't transmit anything to the prostitutes. The most fundamental fact about STDs is that you can only get infected from an infected partner. The prostitutes can get infected ONLY if some of the men are already infected! And where did the men get infected initially? The author doesn't want to think about that.
Furthermore if the monogamous wives each took on an additional partner then you would have a network for spreading HIV similar to what exists in parts of Africa. I'm not sure that I believe the following argument either, but it has been argued that what protects Americans is that we (leaving out those of us who are hobbyists or providers for the moment) practice serial monogamy rather than having multiple partners. HIV is most highly infectious when first acquired (and very late in the course of the disease, of course). The argument is that having multiple partners allows a newly infected (and more highly infectious than he or she will be later) person to infect several other people who then pass the disease through a network of partners while they, in turn, are at their most infectious. I'm not convinced this explains why HIV spreads more rapidly through heterosexual sex in Africa than it seems to in first world countries, but I have seen the argument seriously advanced.
HIV has become endemic in the US population. It is chiefly concentrated in three groups: men who have sex with men, IV drug users who share needles, and anyone (man or woman) who has sex with anyone in the first two groups.
Does anyone (outside the far right) blame prostitutes for the spread of HIV? I haven't read any epidemiologists who do. Is the author serious? Am I an idiot for taking the article as being serious and getting upset?
-- Modified on 11/9/2007 5:08:38 AM
