TAPS Seminar Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, March 21, 2000 Hosted by Dan Ciccarone, MD, MPH, Post-doctoral fellow at CAPS
...PF:...So it's not enough to say, "It's poverty, man." It is, but it's also poverty cheek and jowl by wealth -- or lack of poverty. In other words, the steeper the grade of social inequality, the more risk for HIV. Now, when we started writing about this in the 80's it struck people -- I have witnesses in the room -- it struck people as peculiar. In fact, we were talking about -- and this gets back to the question about sub groups in San Francisco -- I made this hypothesis publicly on a number of occasions. If you could remove gender inequality and social inequality from a sexual relationship, you significantly diminish HIV risks. And of course that hypothesis leads to all sorts of social commentary about arrangements and sexual union. Now it doesn't remove HIV risk, but it allows the possibility of the introduction of effective preventive techniques that we know are virtually 99 per cent effective, and almost 100 per cent effective, if they can be used properly. And the point of my last talk here was: but they can't and they aren't and they won't be. The technologies that we have are men centered. They're used by men. And the central part of the problem here is gender inequality and poverty and social inequality, all three of them conspiring together to increase risk....
<http://HIVInSite.ucsf.edu/social/spotlight/2098.4700.html>