The Truth About AIDS & Heterosexual Transmission

Always use protection, we’re told. Gonorrhea, Syphilis, “The Clap”… they’re all real, and usually quite treatable if caught early. But the biggest, baddest venereal disease has long been HIV, and the debilitating disease it causes, AIDS. Since the 1980s, we’ve been inundated with talk of AIDS and the great threat it poses. But the truth has never been told in mainstream channels, in clear and simple terms: HIV and AIDS are overwhelmingly the province of homosexual men, injectable drug users, and the people who sleep with them.

In America, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates there are just over one million people with HIV. According to the CDC, HIV is at a higher prevalence among homosexual men and intravenous drug users, as compared to heterosexuals. Men who have had sex with men (MSM) within the last five years account for 78% of new male infections,  63% of all new infections, yet MSM are only about 2.0% of the entire population. Once you partition out the HIV rates of the various groups, using data buried in CDC tables, the differences are stark. Below, I’ve presented a series of graphics using the data from Table 17a, page 58, to illustrate the patterns of HIV infection.

Who Is Infected?

This chart illustrates who makes up those infected with HIV – for instance, a quarter of those who are infected with HIV are white men who contracted it from having sex with men. (‘Sober’ is used here to mean that HIV was not contracted through the use of intravenous drugs.) Gay black and Hispanic men are responsible for another 15% and 10% respectively, while intravenous drug users account for another 22%, 5.8 percentage points of whom are men who have sex with men. All told, some 73% of HIV infections are accounted for by men who have sex with men and intravenous drug users, groups that comprise less than 5% of the US population. Even for someone who contracts HIV through heterosexual contact, there’s a good chance she got it from a bisexual man or a needle drug addict. As you may have noticed, a very large proportion of the populace is lumped into that ‘Other’ category. Below is a pie chart of the same groups, except the size of their respective slices indicates their share of the US population as a whole.

How Common Is HIV?

The simple pie charts above don’t demonstrate the prevalence of HIV. I estimated the prevalence of each sub-group, using the CDC data, and these reveal that HIV and AIDS are very rare among straight, drug-free whites and Asians. Hispanic and black straight men are at higher risk, but still vastly below that of homosexual men and intravenous drug users. Comprehensive data on how HIV is being transmitted among heterosexuals is not available in the CDC report. But you can be sure that much of it is occurring because of people sleeping with high risk groups (a woman sleeping with a promiscuous homosexual man, or a man having unprotected anal sex with a heroin addict). Research has consistently shown that even among street hookers, HIV is rare to non-existent so long as the hookers were not using intravenous drugs.

Among men who don’t sleep with men and don’t do intravenous drugs, the prevalence of HIV is about 0.1%, while the comparable figure for gay men is 16%. Below are the rates of infection for various groups, between the ages of 18 and 54, inclusive. As you can see, straight, sober men hardly register; the only straight sober group with a prevalence above 1% are black women. Injectable drug users are represented only in the Injectable Drug Using categories, and not the racial groupings.

How Does The Rate Of Infection Compare Among Groups?

To give you a firmer idea of how the risk compares between groups, I divided the prevalence of HIV among all groups and divided them by the prevalence among sober straight white men. For example, a man who has sex with men is 700 to 800 times more likely to have HIV than a sober straight white man, the reference group. Below are four charts, one for straight men, one for straight women, one for men having sex with men, plus one chart with all of them in a single chart for easy comparison. All racial groups below only pertain to non-IDU users; IDU users of all races are included in the IDU-specific groups. Though not covered here, rates of syphilis are also vastly higher among men who have sex with men, as compared to heterosexuals, a difference of more than 100-fold.

Transmission From Women To Men Via Vaginal Sex Is ‘Inefficient’

A study of sub-Saharan African heterosexual couples where one partner had HIV found that typically only one in 900 acts of unprotected sex would transmit the virus. Stanford School of Medicine’s Dr. Mark Holodniy, when asked how heterosexual men contract HIV, responded “I suspect that some of it relates to whether these men are truly hetero or bisexual, and whether injection drug use is a risk factor.” Provided you are not having sex with men, intravenous drug users, or women who sleep with such people, the risk of getting HIV is infinitesimally small.

Why are these facts kept from the light of day? One can only speculate. Homosexuals are a favorite of the modern left, and these figures would draw scrutiny to their behavior. For instance, why does such a debilitating disease continue to be so rampant among homosexuals? Why is it still spreading, at about 30,000 cases per year among men who have sex with men? Are they really as monogamous as gay marriage advocates would have us believe? On occasion, the media will admit to tiny cracks in the nice narrative of “Homosexuals, Just Like The Rest of Us” –  a study covered in the New York Times reveals that 50% of gay marriages are ‘open marriages.’ Incorporating figures like these into our mental image of homosexuals is sure to raise some thorny questions of policy and propriety, a conversation that the left simply does not want. Meanwhile the mainstream right is too cowardly to pose much opposition.

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