The reaction to Christopher Hajib's wholly sensible and cautious posts and to mine persuades me that the politics of Aids is still hedged about with the kind of assertive lunacy that says you cannot question health campaigns of the surgeon general without being accused of being a holocaust denier. Those who are sent in a spin over Aids ought to ask themselves what they have to be so defensive about? Is the science on Aids so fragile that it cannot be questioned? Is nobody going to offer an explanation as to why the projections of Aids infection so spectacularly deviated from the actual patterns? Or is that just something that you are not supposed to talk about?
In message <a05001924b694bd59e90c@[128.32.105.158]>, Brad DeLong
<delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> writes
>Do you know *anything* about what is going on in Africa? Or Thailand?
Well, I know enough not to extrapolate from some very dodgy statistics based on questionable diagnoses and what a clearly quite distinctive patterns of infection. But of course I appreciate that the zealots of the view that aids will spread in the heterosexual population, unable to demonstrate this in the West are furiously trying to generate the case elsewhere in the world. Given their propensity for making things up, I suggest the same degree of caution about projections of aids infection in Africa as about those in Europe and America of ten years ago.
In message <a05001926b694bfea8382@[128.32.105.158]>, Brad DeLong
<delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> writes
>Every health authority I ever heard said that AIDS was transmitted by
>the exchange of bodily fluids, and that those most at risk were
>homosexuals, needle-sharing drug users, and heterosexuals suffering
>from some other venereal disease.
>
>Who ever said that the threat of AIDS was "uniform"?
The British government launched what it called 'the biggest public health campaign in history', along the lines 'Don't Die of Ignorance' in November 1986, whose essential premise was that the heterosexual aids epidemic was just around the corner (it wasn't). Most activists know and understand that they opportunistically exaggerated the prospect of the disease spreading in the straight community to avoid political isolation. A few years ago I put this point to British aids campaigner Simon Watney, who denied all responsibility, but happily said that this was what happened in France.
-- James Heartfield