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Reprinted from The American Spectator, September-October 2001
Good News on AIDS - Why the Silence?
By Michael Fumento
“The US Centers for Disease Control perform 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.”
===
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. 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 [A & W note: The 40,000 cases the author cited
here erroneously refer to the number ofestimated HIV cases thought
to occur each year in the US]. 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:
Forget the heterosexual AIDS epidemic. The category of those who
so much as claim to have gotten the disease this way comprises over
90 percent of the population but only 11 percent of AIDS cases.
In 1993, 9,570 such cases were reported. By 1999 it was down to
7,139 and last year it fell further, to 6,530.
Forget the teenage epidemic. Teen cases comprised less than one
percent of the total for last year, or 342. This is down from 588
cases in 1993. True, former CDC chief and current Surgeon General
David Satcher did tell a credulous Juan Williams at NPR in early
July that “the median age for women getting AIDS today is
about 16.” Actually, the median according to the CDC annual
report is the 30-34 year-old range. Could he have meant HIV infections,
the earliest stage of the disease? No, the median for those is also
the 30-34 year-old range.
Forget the “rural AIDS explosion.” Rural cases comprised
14 percent of the total for last year, or 3,061 in number. This
is down from 5,809 cases in 1993.
Forget all that “leading cause of death” stuff. AIDS
fell off the CDC top 15 list back in 1998. AIDS deaths have declined
from a high of over 50,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 per year now.
Fewer people died of AIDS last year than any year since 1985.
Childhood AIDS is disappearing. The total of pediatric AIDS cases
last year was less than 200, compared to 959 in 1993.
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 ofgood 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.
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.
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