Friday, June 27, 2008

HIV, still a disease of gay men

A while back people were often saying that HIV would spread from a few small groups like prostitutes and gay men, and move into mainstream America. It was also supposed to become more common in females. Twenty five years after the disease started that is still very much not the case, and there is little reason to think it ever will be.

"Sex between men accounted for more than 97,000 new diagnoses over the six years, almost half of the total number, according to the C.D.C. report." Source

Among males only 11% of new HIV cases are from heterosexual sex! Not only that, but only 15% of heterosexually transmitted cases of HIV were White Males. Only 1.4% of HIV cases have been a white male who got it from heterosexual sex. Want to take bets on how many got it from unprotected anal sex with a prostitute? Unless you do something profoundly dumb, or get amazingly unlucky, as a straight white male HIV is really not a threat. At the same time 59% of new cases are from homosexual sex. Since 77% of cases are males that is a pretty damn huge chunk. As a homosexual guy you better be paranoid. The risk of this happening to you are huge.

As for women facing more risk. The statistics are pretty scary for Black women. 66% of women who get HIV are black. They have been steadily increasing in how common they are. This is probably because of black men getting arrested, having sex with men in prison, then bringing back HIV to their wife when they get out. As a whole though, the number of cases of HIV in women have been flat, or falling. From 9900 in 2001 down to 9300 in 2006.

As a white straight woman getting HIV isn't quite as unlikely as for a straight guy, but still only about 2.6% of HIV cases are a white woman who got it from a man. While it is even more politically incorrect to point out than most cases being gay guys, it is probably true that the significantly higher numbers of white women in marriages with black men than black women with white men has a strong effect on those numbers. In raw numbers there are about twice as many white women who got HIV from heterosexual sex as there are white males. So, there is more to be worried about, but nothing at all compared to what gay men, or black men or women face.

1 comment:

glmory said...

I was planning on deleting this spam comment. However I have rather chosen to go on the record saying that the cure apostle is trying to sell is in fact a scam. Do not touch it with a ten foot pole.

Of course no one reading this will have been fooled by the bad grammar of apostle so that was probably unnecessary.