You do almost have that with the HIV blood donations screening.
Granted, you are measuring altruistic people, and you are filtering
out gays.

dsaklad@zurich.csail.mit.edu wrote...

Actually I just read an article about TB in yesterday's newspaper.  It
was about a new treatment for TB and I started reading it with the bias
that the only reason there is any concern about it is that most people
who have it these days are those with HIV.  Sure enough, about halfway
through it mentioned that.  If it affected otherwise healthy people they
would be happy to let it reach epidemic proportions, but since AIDS
patients are at higher risk that is why they pay any attention to it at
all.

Similarly, I noticed recent hysteria over the first human cases of West
Nile virus in my area.  I think there were 2 or 3 cases, and the news
said that most people who contract the virus experience no symptoms, a
few experience mild flu-like symptoms and recover, and a shocking 1 in
1500 people actually DIE from it.  If you are wondering why they were
in such hysterics, AIDS patients are more likely to die and presumably
make up the majority of West Nile deaths.

And while TB and West Nile aren't good things, the fact that they kill
far more AIDS patients than ordinary healthy people should be grounds
for ENCOURAGING their spread rather than spending trillions of dollars
fighting them.  Especially TB, since the hotbed of TB is in Africa
which is also a hotbed of HIV, instead of treating TB in AIDS patients
they should simply let them die and save the government some money.  If
only governments spent as much preventing HIV as they do preventing
obscure diseases that primarily afflict HIV patients...

Oh, and my final thought is remembering that TB patients used to be
quarantined.  Notice that they're no longer quarantined?  Notice that
the end of quarantine roughly coincides with the appearance of HIV?
In other words, once TB became associated with HIV, it went from
being a quarantinable disease to being politically correct, as it is
politically impossible to quarantine TB victims because it means
quarantining HIV victims.

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"Arguing on the Internet is like running in the Special
Olympics.  Even if you win, you're still retarded."
-- Anonymous
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Roedy Green wrote...

Of course I was exaggerating the exaggerated Kinsey figure of 10%, something
that was never replicated and I'm sure that somewhere along the way I
remember hearing suggestions that perhaps a third of the population had
tried it once.  Anyway, it worked to illustrate some activists might inflate
the numbers to reduce the importance of the 45% of HIV infections that are
MSM; 10% translates as 4.5x the average rate, 3% translates as 15x the average
rate, and of course 45% translates to exactly the average rate, therefore
incentive for activists to stretch the number of homosexuals in the general
population, and of course for political influence.  If Senator Bedfellow
believes 45% of his constituents are gay he will likely vote pro-gay.  And of
course if he thinks less than the 1% Pat Robertson says he will be likely to
oppose gay issues to pacify his majority anti-gay constituents.