HIV/AIDS Skepticism

Pointing to evidence that HIV is not the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS

Italy: Demographics of HIV and AIDS

Posted by Henry Bauer on 2010/01/02

Professor Ruggiero has sent recent official data about HIV and AIDS in Tuscany as well as in Italy as a whole. Both sets of data illustrate once more that HIV/AIDS theory is incapable of explaining salient demographic features of HIV and of AIDS.

For example, in Tuscany the male-to-female ratio for the incidence of AIDS has been essentially constant from 1985 to 2008 at ~3.6:

whereas the purported mode of transmission changed drastically: from ~8% of “HIV” being transmitted heterosexually to ~44% being transmitted in that way — see red curve in figure below:

Those data place a very curious constraint on how infection via dirty needles occurred in males and in females respectively: it must occur in precisely the same relative manner as sexually transmitted “HIV infection” occurs in males relative to females. Otherwise the M/F ratio for the consequences of “HIV”, namely AIDS, should have changed in some manner.
HIV/AIDS apologists can surely find a scenario to satisfy that constraint, while unprejudiced observers will recognize any such scenario as the usual attempt by HIV/AIDS theorists to sell a scientific analogue of snake oil or Brooklyn Bridges.
(American idiom and popular culture include such icons of public gullibility as that snake oil is a panacea for illness and that the Brooklyn Bridge could be bought.)

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Another remarkable phenomenon in the Tuscan data is the upward drift in the median age for an AIDS diagnosis:

The stochastic fluctuations reflect the small numbers involved in each year but do not mask that the difference in median ages between men and women was seemingly constant at about 3 years, while both increased from 1987 to 2008 by about 2/3 of a year per year.
Such an upward drift of the median age of AIDS diagnosis (as well as of the median age of first “HIV-positive” test and median age of AIDS deaths) is also present in US data, albeit of somewhat smaller magnitude (Deaths from “HIV disease”: Why has the median age drifted upwards?, 18 February 2009). The drift in the US data is partly explainable by a changing racial composition of those affected by AIDS. In Tuscany, the drift may be associated with the shift away from predominantly drug abusers (from ~54% to ~19%, see above): “HIV-positive” is a very non-specific indication occasioned by a wide variety of physiological conditions, certainly by serious illness and by drug abuse, and it seems plausible that serious drug abuse brings illness at an earlier age.

The Tuscan data also show quite clearly that AIDS incidence declined significantly after 1995, something that UNAIDS has belatedly acknowledged overall in the world (Not with a bang but a whimper, 2009/12/27).

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The national data from Italy, too, display trends that are incompatible with HIV/AIDS theory. Thus the relative rates of “HIV-positive” among men and women has remained the same

while — as in Tuscany — the supposed mode of becoming “HIV-positive” changed from ~75% drug-related to only ~5% drug-related and sexual transmission supposedly increased from less than 10% to ~80%:

And just as in the Tuscan and the US data, the median age of first “HIV-positive” test has drifted upward over the years:

Whatever the reasons may be for these drifts — changing composition of the populations being tested, changes in the tests themselves — they are certainly inconsistent with what one expects for a sexually transmitted condition about whose dangers the propaganda has been intense. As people become older and less at the mercy of pheromones and hormones, and as they learn from experience to behave less self-destructively (or as the more self-destructive die off), they surely become less and not more likely to contract this particular sexual disease.
But HIV/AIDS theory demands that we believe that all the panic and propaganda of the last 25 years has led mature adults, people exposed to that propaganda for all that time, to behave more foolishly as to sex than do adolescents and young adults. Let’s have some more of that great snake oil, please, and I’ll take another Brooklyn Bridge as well.

Then there’s that shibboleth about the dangers of mother-to-child transmission. Italy reports a total of 62,000 AIDS cases from 1982 to 2009, 27% of whom were women, therefore some 16,700. Yet only 716 cases of mother-to-child transmission have been recorded — in Tuscany, the region with the highest prevalence of “HIV-positive”, not a single pediatric AIDS case since 2001. Since the median age of “HIV-positive” women is right in the prime child-bearing years, this is so low as, once again, to throw into ludicrous question the tenets of HIV/AIDS theorists.

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As in the US data, the Italian data show astonishingly regular trends — astonishing, that is, for a sexually transmitted pathogen. Regular trends is another way of saying reproducible, predictable. The incidence of a sexually transmitted infection varies over time, by region, by sex, by age . . . as illustrated copiously in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (for example, Figure 5, p. 32, and Table 5, p. 34 for gonorrhea, and Figure 4, p. 32, Figure 7, p. 33, Figure 8, p.35 for syphilis). By contrast, “HIV-positive” is ALWAYS at a maximum in early middle age; ALWAYS greater among those of African ancestry than among those of Caucasian ancestry, among whom it is ALWAYS greater than among people of Asian ancestry. In the United States, Hispanics on the West Coast are ALWAYS much less “infected” than Hispanics on the East Coast, be it among gay men or among child-bearing women or among soldiers or any other tested group.

Please explain those regularities as compatible with sexual transmission; and pass that snake oil again while you’re at it.

6 Responses to “Italy: Demographics of HIV and AIDS”

  1. Guy Harris said

    Hispanics on the East coast are more likely to have African ancestry than Hispanics on the West coast. Does anyone keep detailed enough records to know which of the ten tests in the Western blot tend to turn up positive for people from Africa or who have African ancestry? Could this be related to the fact (anecdotal) that people of African ancestry seem to be more resistant to tropical diseases than other peoples.

    • Henry Bauer said

      Guy Harris: YES. Africans test “HIV+” much more often than others; East-Coast “Hispanics” tend to have much African ancestry whereas West-Coast “Hispanics” are largely Mexican; Africans have higher levels of all sorts of antibodies. Those points are discussed at length in my book, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland 2007)

  2. Liam said

    Great work Dr. B! But don’t you see? In Italia, fewer women ‘have it,’ because in African, MORE women ‘have it.’ See? That’s how sci-ligion works! It’s scienfictionic!

    In any case, it seems they’ve been pushing the middle-aged ‘eterosessuali’ to prende il test.

  3. Philip said

    Here’s a thought. They’re getting diagnosed older as time passes on. In 1985, a 24 year old male is most likely to test positive. Ten years later, it’s a 34 year old male. In other words, the 24 year old in 1985 and the 34 year old in 1995 were probably from the same generation – they could have gotten “infected” (or made to produce enough antibodies to whatever to trigger a positive result) at the same time but were detected at different times. Perhaps they were subjected to the same batch of hepatitis B vaccines? A similar environmental stimulus at a point in time?

    By that logic however, the graph should be linear instead of slowing to a plateau. Oh well.

  4. Joe said

    I would be interested to see these figures correlated against the real STIs. The last time I looked at that kind of STI data for the UK, I thought that the STIs were mostly in people under 30. If there were an upward drift in the median ages in which those STIs occurred in Italy then it might show there was a trend that older people were engaging in far more promiscuous sex than they might have been doing 25 years ago.

    But I doubt it. Despite the increasing rates of divorce, I don’t see the people I know who are 30+ engaging in casual sex. They might be doing it in secret, but then the STI-by-age data should reveal that.

    • Henry Bauer said

      Joe: The question is, why would the age distribution for promiscuity have shifted to greater age even as sexual behavior has become increasingly casual among young people. Mores as well as finance is becoming globalized. Here are recent percentages of babies born to unwed mothers:
      Iceland 66%, Sweden 55%, France 50%, UK 44%, USA 40%, Ireland 33%, Canada 30%, Italy 21%. The USA level changed from 20% in 1980 to 34% in 2002 and 40% by 2007.
      The upward drift in median HIV+ and AIDS ages is seen in Italy and in USA, which have greatly different rates of births to unwed mothers.

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