Darin BrownStatistics….
Posted by Henry Bauer on 2009/06/26
Here’s an illustration of how to lie with statistics. Have the media disseminate estimates as though they were facts:
“Few sexually active teens in US get HIV test — CDC
Thu Jun 25, 2009 3:08pm EDT
CHICAGO, June 25 (Reuters) – Nearly half the HIV-positive U.S. adolescents and young adults are unaware of their infection, and less than a quarter of sexually active high school students are tested for the virus, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.”
— Unnamed “officials”, easily confused with “experts”
— “Nearly” half giving a spurious sense of exact knowledge
— Giving a number for something that cannot be measured
“Only 22 percent of sexually active high school students are tested for human immunodeficiency virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an analysis using data from a 2007 survey of students in grades 9-12 (ages 14-18).”
— “Sexually active” is self-reported, of course
— So is being tested, since that’s confidential
“people aged 12 to 24 represented 4.4 percent of the estimated 1.1 million people in the United States infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yet they represented 10 percent of the estimated 232,700 people living with the virus without knowing it.”
— It cannot be known how many are “infected” without knowing it.
— CDC models for the “epidemic” have been shown to be invalid in a number of respects, see The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.
— Note the misleading precision of “232,700”; so much more impressive than being honest and saying “about 230,000”. Even were the models valid, they couldn’t be more precise than that.
“HIV testing was more common among students who had ever been taught in school about AIDS or HIV infection than among those who had not”
— Hurrah for successful propaganda.
HIV/AIDS Skepticism 
Dave said
How is it possible that 230,000 people are living with HIV and not knowing it? Is this another bogus computer model?
If 230,000 people are living with HIV and not knowing it, they should be: (1) spreading the dreaded virus in almost epidemic fashion, and (2) dying in large numbers, since they are not taking “life-saving” anti-viral medication.
Typical AIDS double-speak.
Henry Bauer said
Dave:
What irritated me so much is that they’ve been doing this for years, the only new thing was specifying it for the young age group separately.
The estimates of “HIV+” Americans has been of the order of 1 milllion since the mid-1980s. CDC has been claiming for a long time that something like a quarter of them didn’t know it. (Does anyone know it before they’re tested?!) The numbers of deaths would then have been hundreds of thousands a year starting that “latent period” from whenever “infections” first got going. If there were 1 million already in 1985, it would have to have been building up to that for quite a number of years.
It just doesn’t compute.
Connie said
And if we actually had twice as many HIV + people as the record shows, wouldn’t the already large gap in corrleation between HIV numbers and actual AIDS cases be twice as big yet again?