“HIV” is NOT sexually transmitted — yet more clear evidence

Recent Nobelist in biology, Randy Schekman, launched a venture to improve publication of valuable research (Science rewards hucksters and spin artists, not soundly tested science): the Open Access on-line eLIFE.

Straightforward evidence that “HIV” is not sexually transmitted — in particular, not by heterosexual intercourse in Africa — is present in “Earlier menarche is associated with a higher prevalence of Herpes simplex type-2 (HSV-2) in young women in rural Malawi”, Glynn et al., eLife 2014;3:e01604, 28 January 2014.

The article’s main point is less than surprising: “girls with earlier menarche tend to have earlier sexual debut and school drop-out, so an association might be expected” with being more likely to contract sexually transmitted infections (STIs or STDs).
That expectation was confirmed by a close-to-linear relationship between age at menarche and prevalence of herpes (HSV-2) infection:

By contrast, there was no correlation at all between “HIV-positive” and age at menarche.

Furthermore, prevalence of “HIV” was much lower than that of HSV-2, contrary to yet another shibboleth of HIV/AIDS theory, namely, that infections by an STD like HSV-2 makes “HIV-positive” more likely:

In an earlier article (Glynn et al., “Assessing the validity of sexual behaviour reports in a whole population survey in rural Malawi”, PLoSONE, 27 July 2011) the ratio of “HIV-positive” to HSV-2 infection had been reported as 4/31 for females and 2/52 for males, again confirming that “HIV-positive” is much less prevalent than HSV-2.

Not, of course, that this further evidence that “HIV” isn’t an STD will make any difference, more-than-ample evidence has been around for many years.