STOP PRESS: 40% DECREASE in HIV in Washington DC

Those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, goes the well-known saying. Those whose memories are short are in quite a pickle; and that includes our media and the HIV/AIDS advocates who feed the media. Their preoccupation with NEW NEWS and WORRYING NEWS is coupled with lack of memory, perhaps because in the rush to hit the headlines or to ask for more funding, respectively, there just isn’t time to look even at yesteryear’s “news”.

And so it happens that the reading or listening public is misled over and over again:
“HIV/AIDS rate in D.C. hits 3 percent”, Newsday trumpeted on 17 March  , benefiting from information fed by that respectable source, the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. This worrisome news was picked up, of course, everywhere: the New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”); Washington’s City Paper, of course:
“How Does D.C.’s HIV Rate Compare to Other Cities? ‘. . . twice as high as New York City and five times as high as Detroit,’ . . . . wasn’t aware of a city with a higher infection rate”;
and the D.C.’s Examiner:
“HIV/AIDS rate hits 3 percent in D.C. . . .  most prevalent among black men, whose infection rate more than doubles that of Hispanic males. It is most common in 40- to 49-year-olds, and it is found in every Washington neighborhood” [emphases added];
Radio is not to be left behind:
“HIV/AIDS Rate Higher in DC than West Africa” on Air America,
and of course this news is disseminated across the world, for example in Germany:
“Aids wird in Washington zu schwerer Epidemie — Eine Aids-Epidemie in der US-Hauptstadt Washington hat inzwischen Ausmaße wie in einem Entwicklungsland angenommen” (AIDS becomes heavy epidemic on Washington — USA’s capital city as affected as a developing nation).

The main thing wrong here is “hits”, that insidious little word which implies that the rate has been increasing, and which is therefore the reason why it’s news. But more is wrong further into the story:
“’Our rates are higher than West Africa,’ said Shannon Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. ‘They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.’”
Well, of course the rates are higher than in some parts of Africa, because the rates in Africa vary from 0.1% or less in the north to >20% in most of the very south [Deconstructing HIV/AIDS in “Sub-Saharan Africa” and “The Caribbean”, 21 April 2008].
The warrant for “hits”, implying an increase, is that “The District’s report found a 22 percent increase in HIV and AIDS cases from the 12,428 reported at the end of 2006”. But an increase in NUMBERS doesn’t translate necessarily into an increase in RATE, it may just mean that more people have been tested. And in fact that’s the case here, and, as so often,

an “epidemic” of “HIV infection”
is actually an EPIDEMIC OF TESTING.

Ignorance of the past is exemplified here by the report, from January 2008,  that “One in 20 Washington, D.C., residents is HIV-positive” . One in 20 equals 5%. Fifteen months later, the media trumpet the alarming “news” that the rate has “hit” 3%. They should rather have been celebrating the 40% decrease from 5 percent to only 3 percent in not much over a year.

With the media, it’s a lack of familiarity with the data and the history of these press releases. With officialdom, it’s that every string must be pulled to remind everyone how serious the situation is and how desperately the pertinent agencies, offices, and workers need continual infusion of funds.

Bernie Madoff  skimmed about $65 billion. The HIV/AIDS hysteria has cost several times that much over the years. To my knowledge, Madoff may have caused a very small number of deaths directly through suicide of those he fleeced and indirectly through impoverishing others with consequent ill effects on their health; but HIV/AIDS dogma has killed hundreds of thousands of people directly by means of AZT and its successors — all because the people who should do so, haven’t looked properly at the data.

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Ever since “HIV” testing began, it’s been known that publicly identified gay men test “HIV-positive” at very high rates. It’s also been known that rates of testing “HIV-positive” vary PREDICTABLY with racial ancestry: blacks test higher than any other group, by factors usually no lower than about 5 and often by factors as high as 20 (black women compared to white women) or even 100 (black female blood donors compared to white female blood donors in South Africa). It’s also been reported in every study that looks at population density that rates of testing “HIV-positive” are about 4 times as high in large metropolitan areas as in rural ones.

Data supporting the assertions just made are cited in profusion in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland 2007). This blog has recalled and augmented those data many times, for example, “HIV/AIDS theory is inescapably racist”, 19 May 2008 and others linked from there.

Washington DC is a large metropolitan area, overwhelmingly black, with the relatively high concentration of gay men found in most large cities. That’s why Washington DC has now, AND  ALWAYS  HAS  HAD, an overall rate of “HIV-positive” that’s higher by a factor of about 5 than the overall rate for the United States (~0.6%). The report that “HIV” is found in every part of Washington (highlighted phrase in one of the quotes above) already should warn any thinking person that this is not a sexually transmitted infection. The other highlighted phrase in the same quote, “most common in 40- to 49-year-olds [black males]”, is simply yet another confirmation of points I’ve made often:  males always test “HIV-positive” more often than females, typically by factors of 2 or 3; and, in every group, people test “HIV-positive” most often in the prime years of adulthood — overall 35-45, but the peak positive-testing age is higher for blacks and for males than for others (for example, “Least susceptible = most affected?! More HIV/AIDS nonsense”, 22 February 2009 ), hence 40-49 for black males rather than 35-45 for the US population as a whole.

There’s nothing unusual or alarming about “HIV” in Washington, or anywhere else. Or, rather, what’s alarming is that “HIV-positive” is taken, without further ado, as denoting active infection by a fatal pathogen; which leads to “treatment” with substances that are at the very least unpleasant in their “side” effects, more often somewhat debilitating, and at worst lethal.