11 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ AIDS ‘n’ teh Pope”

  1. AIDS is becoming a big problem especially in Sub Saharan Africa where it is outdone only by malaria and cancer so there really is good reason to encourage use of condoms to check the spread.

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    1. Condoms (of first world quality) have been spread down there for decades now. STI like gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, HPV, HSV and Trichomoniasis have been on the steady decline in South Africa / Botswana. HIV has been untouched. Any armchair epidemiologists here care to explain why?

      Many modelers (that I have worked with intimately) as well as the powers that be (CDC / UNAIDS) have been misguided about the driving force(s) behind HIV’s spread for as long as I have been in public health (1988).

      I alluded in a previous post to the peer-review process “lacking”, at least in my very politically-charged and incestuous corner of the scientific community. This example (AIDS in Africa) is what I was talking about. Anyone interested in this sordid history is encouraged to pick through articles 90 and on here.

      PS – another paper reiterating what we’ve already said about “concurrency” as an explainer of the HIV pandemic was released two days ago. I expect it to fall on deaf ears as well, despite its sound methodology and argumentation.

      Stephen Q Muth

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      1. That is interesting. Without reading all that, would contamination explain how children get infected with HIV at birth or shortly after rather than in utero? Someone quoted to me earlier this week a figure of 13,000 children born with HIV in Kenya in a year…

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        1. Yes. “Contamination” (meaning contaminated sharps) would definitely explain matters. The paper most directly talking about this in Kenyan children is #181 (with a reply to critiques at #194). Here’s a list of which publications deal with either children, shitty interpretations or collection of Kenyan data, or both:

          #96, #101, #107, #112, #121, (#139 for info on the crappy epi in Kenya, #155/#163 which shows a correlation between HIV and circumcision in BOTH males and females Kenya included, #157/#170 which critiques more crappy analyses of Kenyan data), #160, #187, #201)

          If you don’t have time to follow those links, you can look at the synopses in the text on that website. Each publication is succinctly described by those thumbnails.

          Please do contact me privately if you’d like anything on that site in PDF form. Some of those links might not work anymore.

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        2. I also urge everyone who thinks they know anything about HIV transmission to read all thumbnails of the papers related to HIV, in chronological order.

          You will see systematic denial, personally and institutionally, of what should be obvious. This is your tax dollars at work in HIV epidemiology — scientific reasoning and peer-review in the toilet. There has been so much time and money wasted down there, I cry when I think about it too hard.

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    2. AIDS is becoming a big problem especially in Sub Saharan Africa

      “becoming”? Becoming? It has been one of the biggest killers (from being nowhere) for a decade, if not two.
      It was petrifying people when I first went to work in Africa in 2004 ; Africans who I worked with in other parts of the world were petrified of it back in the mid-90s.
      Oh, what’s this about explosions in the skies above Russia? That’s a bit more of a response to my typing than I expected. Praise Dawkins, and the Noodly Appendage! And where’s my monocular, for tonight’s near-miss?
      “Meteorite crash in Russia: UFO fears spark panic in Chelyabinsk “

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        1. Nae problem.
          Meanwhile, I was just mailing Dad about the meteorite:

          After several hours for reports to come in, it sounds as if there have been a significant number of injuries from the “atmospheric effects”.

          Челябинск is a fairly anonymous industrial city on the eastern edge of the Urals. Oksana and I passed through there on our trip to Сатка in 2004 (where we rafted down the river Аэ), and it’s a major stopping point on the “Trans-Siberian Railway” (which is about as existent as the Penzance to Aberdeen railway – the lines exist, but not as a designed whole, or even as a through trip), being about 2 days out from Moscow.
          The question is sure to be raised of “how come this has happened twice in Russia” (by people remembering something about the “Tunguska event”). Firstly, given that Russia is something like 1/6 of the land surface of the globe, that alone is not particularly significant.
          Secondly, between Tunguska and today, there has been at least one reported “airburst” event (over Amazonia, in the late 1930s. That’s if you don’t count the small, but *pre*dicted, airburst over Sudan a couple of years ago, from which meteorites have been recovered. And there are persistent reports that the military have been spotting what they eventually recognised as “airburst” events using [classified] spy satellites for years. So, in all, it’s not terribly surprising to have two in Russia.
          Watching DA14 tonight? I’m digging out my monocular (half-binocular)!

          I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to see the Russian Ghoddistas crawling out of the woodwork telling people to (2) repent, now! ; (1) tithe (regularly) ; (3) “the end is nigh”, so tithe more frequently.
          And I’ve now got to go to see clients, but I’m putting my sky map and monocular into the bag!
          Keep looking up – hope you get some meteorite dust in your eye, but it’s more likely to be a seagull ! 🙂
          Oh, more breaking news. Norway has had Dobbin burgers too. I was disappointed not to be given the choice of Flipper steaks while I was there. But it was an Airport hotel, so maybe they were dodging the controversy.

          Reply

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