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.

ANOTHER STRIKING SUCCESS AGAINST HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA

I noted some time ago (NOTEWORTHY SUCCESSES AGAINST AIDS IN AFRICA, 4 December 2007) that several African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe) were able to decrease the prevalence of HIV more than could be accounted for by deaths. That’s just another of the many mysteries posed by HIV/AIDS theory. Infection by HIV is said to be permanent. Therefore, if the overall rate of infection in a country decreases, that can only be through removal of infected individuals through death or emigration—removal of a larger number than the number of new infections.

(An alternative explanation, of course, is that “HIV-positive” is neither permanent nor a sign of infection by a virus. But that simple explanation is beyond the pale.)

Rwanda offers another such nail in the coffin of HIV/AIDS theory:

“Rwanda in mass circumcision drive” (BBC, 22 January 2008 )
”Figures from the World Bank last year put the prevalence of Aids in the country at about 3%, down from 11% in 2000.”

So at least 8% of the population must have died from HIV/AIDS during seven or eight years, say 1% per year. (“At least” because it assumes no new infections during that time.) The total population is a little less than 10,000,000. Therefore about 100,000 a year must have died from HIV/AIDS.

The CIA Fact Book gives the overall death rate in Rwanda as about 15 per 1000. For the population of 10 million, this is 150,000 per year. If there were 100,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS, then deaths from all other causes would have been only 50,000, or 5 per 1000 for the population as a whole. Such a “natural” death rate of 5 per 1000, however, is impossibly lower than that in the countries enjoying the longest lifespan: overall death rates are 10.3 per 1000 in Sweden, about 9 in Japan, 8.3 in the USA, 7.9 in Canada, 7.6 in Australia.

But perhaps 100,000 didn’t die each year from HIV disease; after all, the CIA Fact Book also gives the number of HIV/AIDS deaths for 2003 as 22,000.

Perhaps 78,000 HIV-positive Rwandans (100,000 minus 22,000) became spontaneously HIV-negative each year?
No, we’re told that’s impossible (even though there are plenty of reports of spontaneous seroreversion, see for instance HIV “INFECTION” DISAPPEARS SPONTANEOUSLY, 22 January 2008)

Perhaps the HIV-positive rates reported by the World Bank were wrong by something like a factor of about 5?
Well, if so, then the policies regarding HIV/AIDS that have been followed by the World Bank and other such prestigious organizations are based on entirely wrong numbers.

Perhaps HIV/AIDS numbers issued by official bodies shouldn’t be taken too seriously?
Indeed they should not; see Russian statistics in HIV NONSENSE: TODAY AND EVERY DAY, 22 November 2007; HIV DOUBLETHINK, 27 November 2007; HIV/AIDS: NUMBERS THAT DON’T ADD UP, 29 November; WORLD AIDS DAY . . ., 22 December 2007.

Perhaps numbers from the CIA Fact Book should not be taken seriously? After all, it reports that the Rwandan population grew at an estimated rate of 2.766% (not, in other words [or numbers] a rate of 2.767%, or of 2.765%).
How could an estimate be so accurate?
Once again, apparently the output of a computer program was copied, published, and disseminated without the benefit of intervening thought. CIA statisticians need to be included among those federal officials who deserve a short course in the use of significant figures in mathematics (MATHEMATICAL AND STATISTICAL LIES ABOUT HIV/AIDS, 2 December 2007).