--- James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
wrote: > <matt.hogan at lycos.com> writes
> >REgarding AIDS and Africa: It is a well known fact
> that when men leave their
> >farms(and families) to look for work in the cities,
> they patronize the
> >prostitutes there. To blunt the onward march of
> AIDS in Africa, we can supply
> >condoms, education about transmission, and clean
> needles--but, I'm afraid,
> >that's it.
>
>
> Isn't this just the kind of 'well-known fact' that
> informs the
> discussion of AIDS in Africa: a western
> preoccupation with supposedly
> rampant black sexuality?
I don't see "African men" in the post above. Men, in general, visit prostitutes when they are displaced from their usual sources of sexual intercourse. Africa has far more men on the move than most other places, and therefore, presumably, is a bigger prostitution market. The predominance of itinerant workers, prostitutes and truck drivers as vectors of infection in Africa is easily explicable by fairly obvious social causes, as is their relative absence in Europe (after the fact -- more on your curious attitude to predictions below). The fact that homosexuals and intravenous drug users were the vectors of infection in Europe and America is also presumably, explainable in the same way. This isn't exactly graduate-level epidemiology.
Furthermore, the core of your argument seems to be contained in this exchange between you and Dennis:
---------------------------
>>> [JH] 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?
>> [DR] This is getting tiresome. *Which* deviations?
>the deviations between the predicted patterns of
>infection and those that took place.
>Department of Health, Short-term Prediction of HIV
>infection in England and Wales, 1988, wrote: Aids
>cases would be between 3600 and 12000 in
>1992. Actual number 1600.
>In the fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic in the UK
>252 cases in total outside of high-risk groups.
----------------------------------
which is pretty weak. In the first place, has it not struck you that forecasting is difficult? Given the performance of economic and meteorological forecasts, the fact that an epidemiological projection of a new disease based on no data turned out to be vastly wrong should be no huge surprise. The report in fact noted that they didn't even reliably know the incidence of heterosexual AIDS at the time!
Second, the projection was made in anticipation that someone would do something about it. It did not (because could not) anticipate that the policy reaction that it recommended. Central bank forecasts are always among the worst in the market, because they assume constant interest rates. When a doctor tells you to change your lifestyle or you'll be dead at 29, he's not making a prediction. If you actually survive to a healthy 90, he's more likely to count it a success of intervention than a failure of prediction.
Third, the projections were made using actuarial techniques which were originally designed to make sure that life companies were not under-reserved, so it's hardly surprising that they erred on the side of caution.
Finally, you and Chris are affecting a wounded-fawn surprise at why the reaction to your assertions is so vehement. I can't believe that this confusion is wholly genuine. People are pissed off because you are asserting that gay men are dying of AIDS because of their behaviour rather than because of a disease. Which is very close to saying that it's their fault. If you don't actually believe that, you've been very reckless in not making it clear what you are saying. In other words, it's your fault.
Chris' points I am not engaging with, because his twin assertions of "there is no evidence that HIV causes AIDS, so it doesn't" and "there is no evidence that alternative medicine doesn't work, so it does" proves to my satisfaction that he is using something more than reason as a mechanism for selecting his beliefs on this subject.
dd
===== “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men” -- JM Keynes
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