Many thanks for this information. It reminds me how often one can surmise dark reasons when the real basis is innocent. A favorite saying, which I too often forget to apply to a particular situation, is: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, because the latter is so common.

At the time, we didn’t know a lot about how HIV spread, and there was a fear among the public that it could be spread by rather casual contact. There were also doctors who were concerned about the wide-spread HIV infection in Bell Glade, Florida and the surrounding areas. They were investigating whether mosquitoes could spread the disease — again not an official public-health position.

[LATER]

Oh, and BTW, the HIV outbreak in Belle Glade became a non-story when it was realized that those people infected were primarily Jamaicans brought to the area to chop sugar cane.

Public health officials, from the CDC to local health departments, were in a panic to show that they were in control of the situation, when, of course, they were not. They blamed the media for causing the fear shared by many people at that time, and demanded that we not refer to someone as having AIDS. They only wanted them described as HIV positive.

Now, many people in the media are not very imaginative. They frequently use cliches instead of writing clearly. This “HIV — the virus that causes AIDS” has now become one of those cliches.

This and related questions are addressed in extraordinary detail in Steven Epstein’s book, Impure Science, the second chapter, “HIV and the Consolidation of Certainty”:

http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1s20045x&chunk.id=d0e2059&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e2059&brand=eschol

I combined your two comments.

Your mention of friends from “Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, Zimbabwe and so on” indicates that you agree with me that behavior, including sexual behavior, is determined by cultural milieu, social conditions, and is not a fixed racial attribute.

As to 20 to 1, that describes the relative RATES of testing HIV+, not numbers; if 1 white woman in 1000 white women tests positive, then (about) 20 black women out of 1000 black women in similar social circumstances will test positive.

As to truck drivers spreading HIV, which official sources like to refer to, it is a story with no evidence to back it up; see my response to Jeff McD for a citation.

What’s politically correct is to accept that HIV is a sexually transmitted infection that causes AIDS. If you ask for the evidence, or point out that the evidence disproves that view, you offend innumerable pooh-bahs and “right-thinking” celebrities.

I am not aware of any study of racial differences in the use of condoms. As to a tendency to have sex with multiple partners, that describes human males; I have seen no evidence that it is race-linked.

In a later post I will be citing a number of studies that have found no racial differences in sexual behavior that could explain the racial disparities in testing HIV-positive. A few of those are cited at p. 77 in my book The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory — http://failingsofhivaidstheory.homestead.com/; they are
Bausell et al., AIDS Research 2 (1986) 253-8
Friedman et al., Milbank Quarterly 65 (suppl. 2, 1987) 455-99
Samuel & Winkelstein, JAMA . 257 (1987) 1901-2
San Francisco Epidemiological Bulletin 2 (12, 1986) 1-3

The notion that condoms reduce transmission of HIV is a deduction based on the prior belief that HIV is sexually transmitted. On the other hand, the data on transmission of venereal diseases (sexually transmitted diseases, STDs) and on the relation between HIV and STDs show inductively that HIV is not sexually transmitted; and a number of reports have found directly that condom use has not been proved to decrease the probability that the HIV-negative partner of an HIV-positive person will seroconvert.

For example, Wawer et al. (J. Infect. Dis. 191 [2005] 1403-9) found that “there was no significant difference in the rate of HIV transmission per coital act with inconsistent condom use, compared with no reported use, at any stage of infection”; as did Padian et al. (JAMA 257 [1987] 788-90). All studies of sexual transmission of HIV have found probabilities on the order of 1 per 1000 acts of unprotected intercourse, staggeringly less than with known STDs; “A review of such studies (Chakraborty et al., AIDS 15 [2001] 621-6) concluded that ‘the transmission probabilities presented are so low that it becomes difficult to understand the magnitude of the HIV-1 pandemic’.”

Assertions that fly in the face of this and other observational evidence continue to come from official sources. For example, an editorial in the British Medical Journal (329 [2004] 185-6) does so, citing a workshop at the National Institutes of Health— http://www.niaid.nih.gov/dmid/stds/condomreport.pdf. But in the report from that workshop, the assertion that condom use decreases transmission of HIV merely cites a meta-analysis that used only 12 of some larger number of published studies and which confirmed once again that unprotected intercourse is an incredibly inefficient way of passing on the HIV-positive condition: 6.7 seroconversions per 100 person-years—at only 50 acts per year, 1 per week, that is a probability of 1.3 per 1000; at the more common 2-3 acts per week, the probability is 5 per 10,000. The probability of transmitting any of syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, or chlamydia is hundreds of times greater. In the most cited (as well as misinterpreted) study, by Padian (Am. J. Epidem. 146 [1997] 350-7), not a single seroconversion was observed during the course of the actual study, which stretched over a decade.

It is also routinely asserted that one is more likely to become HIV-positive if one already has an STD. But many data contradict this as well. On p. 109 of my book I cite data showing that rates of HIV-positive and of STD infections changed in opposite directions over the years in French Polynesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, and Thailand; and that interventions to reduce transmission risks in Uganda did indeed reduce the incidence of gonorrhea, herpes, and syphilis, while the incidence of HIV remained unchanged. On p. 115 I cite a study in Pakistan that found syphilis at 12% among truck drivers, yet not a single HIV-positive among 300 drivers, even though more than 50% reported sex with prostitutes, 20% reported male-to-male sex, only 5% used condoms in their last sexual encounter, and more than 65% never used a condom. In China, no HIV was detected among gay men despite a 10% prevalence of syphilis (He et al., AIDS Behav. 2006 Jun 27; PMID: 16802197) nor among a group of gay men with gonorrhea prevalence at 2.7%, chlamydia at 8%, urethritis at 27.7%, active syphilis at 6.9%, herpes 7.8%, hepatitis B at 9.1%, and genital warts at 13.2% (Jiang et al., Sex Transm Dis. 33 [2006] 118-23). Among a group of gay men in Sydney (Australia) who had syphilis, only 54% were HIV-positive (Jin et al., Med. J. Aust. 183 [2005] 172-3, 179-83). In Ireland, among 547 men with syphilis (415 of them being gay men), only 4% were HIV-positive but 15.4% had some other STD (Cronin et al., Euro Surveill. 9 [#12, 2004] 14-7; PMID: 15677853).

There is no proof that HIV-positive is sexually transmitted, and—therefore, unsurprisingly— there is no proof that transmission of the HIV-positive condition is significantly decreased by the use of condoms.