Right, how can every country have their own definition of 'AIDS'?

And why are there different testing standards on different continents?
Not just the single ELISA used in Africa, but the use of Western Blot
as THE confirmation test in the US, while it is not used for diagnosis
in the UK at all.

Alex

You mean, no sense you can make of it? For example, Kaposi's Sarcoma
is only an 'aids defining illness' in combination of a positive HIV test.

So how can it be AIDS defining? For that matter, how can something
as common as TB be 'AIDS defining' - it isn't, of course.

Like Kaposi's Sarcoma? Which is a cancer? How is this an opportunistic
infection again? Or a sign of a compromised immune system? Is cancer
now a sign of a compromised immune system?

Alex

I'm getting tired of this - again, this is not true.

The Bangui Definition is very real, and well documented.

Alex

"Moira de Swardt" <moira.ds@wol.co.za> wrote in message

In October 1985, a conference of public health officials including representatives of the
Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization met in Bangui and defined AIDS in
Africa as, "prolonged fevers for a month or more, weight loss of over 10% and prolonged
diarrhea". About half the AIDS cases in Africa based on the Bangui definition are HIV positive.

"Moira de Swardt" <moira.ds@wol.co.za> wrote in message

However the figures of Black African men diagnosed HIV+ in the UK
during those years is just over half:

2002: 1098
2003: 1276
2004: 1300

They're here if anyone is interested:
<http://www.hpa.org.uk/infections/topics_az/hiv_and_sti/hiv/epidemiology/hars_tab
les.htm>.

I didn't use more recent figures because these things tend to take a
while to filter through the system.  However, they do follow the same
pattern in 2005 and 2006.

And, of course, it's worth mentioning that we don't all only have
sexual relationships within our own 'ethnic group.' :)

I don't know.  There is some evidence that the more people you test
for HIV the more HIV+ diagnosis you get.  I suppose that's fairly
obvious.  But if Black African women have been identified as a high
risk group, which they probably have, perhaps statistically more of
them have an HIV test, so you get more positives.

And, as we know, an HIV test doesn't test for HIV.  So, perhaps, Black
African women and gay men have something in common which leads to a
higher percentage than the norm having a positive result.

"Moira de Swardt" <moira.ds@wol.co.za> wrote in message

Reprinted from Details Magazine, March 2004
Whatever Happened to AIDS and Straight Men?
By Kevin Gray

"Health officials have known this for years, but the politically incorrect truth is rarely
spoken out loud: The dreaded heterosexual epidemic never happened. The result is a conspiracy
of silence. And it's not in anybody's interest to clear this up."

===

In 1987, America was obsessed with sex. On the radio, the average high school rocker heard the
command to "push it" and eagerly obliged. On Friday nights he put on acid washed jeans and took
his date to see Glenn Close boil rabbit. He received stud lessons from a beer-guzzling, model
nailing pooch named Spuds Mackenzie. He channel-surfed in parachute pants and saw Jessica Hahn
bring televangelist Jim Baker to his knees. In between, he found TV's first ever condom ads.
Yes, sir, sex was on his mind. And it was about to turn deadly.

That fall, federal health officials sounded a terrifying alarm: AIDS could kill anyone. For six
years we had known that the disease was stalking America's gay men and intravenous-drug users.
It deposited purple blotches on their skin, sent their minds into spirals of dementia, reduced
their bodies to withered skeletons. Our high-schooler had heard about it but he didn't give it
much thought. Like most of America, he vaguely worried that he might catch it from a toilet
seat, a sneeze, or a handshake. But it didn't truly.concern him.

Until the panic landed with a thump at newsstands. Stacks of U.S. News & World Report heralded
"the dawn of fear," telling him "The disease of them suddenly is the disease of us." AIDS, it
seemed, was spreading through the heterosexual population-through straight sex!-at a fearsome
rate that health experts likened to the Black Plague. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called it
"the biggest threat to health this nation has ever faced."

Suddenly, wherever our kid turned-MTV, Time Magazine-he saw a parade of walking dead, people
who looked and talked like him, grimly recounting one-night-stand horror stories. The message:
Whether you're a Berkeley co-ed or a Portland plumber, plain old vanilla intercourse can kill
you. And in case he still didn't get it, from daytime TV came a voice so grave, so full of
maternal concern, it stopped him dead in his Reeboks. "Aids has both sexes running scared,"
Oprah Winfrey said. "Research studies now project that one in five--listen to me, hard to
believe-one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three
years.believe me."

The idea was staggering: Nearly 44 million people dead in less time than it takes tofinish
college. AIDS anxiety suddenly gripped the country. Our young guy recalled last Saturday's bar
pick up, a buddy's too easy sister, even his new girlfriend. How well did he know her? Some
mornings he saw, or thought he saw, a red rash spreading across his flesh (hadn't it just been
a vigorous romp?) and bolted to the nearest clinic for a blood test, joining a brotherhood that
doctors called "the worried well." Sex was no longer just a game; it was Russian roulette.

Since doctors first reported the outbreak of a mysterious new disease in 1981, an estimated
900,000 Americans have been diagnosed with AIDS. Nearly half of them were men who had sex with
other men, 27 percent were IV-drug users, and another 7 percent were both. But the politically
incorrect truth is rarely spoken out loud: The dreaded heterosexual epidemic never happened.

Straight men and women make up 90 percent of the population, but they account for only 15
percent of non-childhood AIDS cases. Only 6 percent of men with AIDS, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention says, contracted the virus from straight sex. And even that figure
doesn't hold up to a closer look. Several studies now suggest that most men who claim they got
the virus this way are lying. They got it from sex with other men or sharing needles with
addicts. Those studies also show that many women listed in the straight-sex category are either
IV-drug users themselves or have likely contracted AIDS from sex with an IV drug user.

Health officials have known these things for years. A growing pile of federally funded reports
on HIV transmission, published over the past decade and available to anyone who has the time to
read them, shows that men almost never get HIV from women.  In fact, according to a 1998 study
in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a disease-free man who has an unprotected
one-nighter with a drug-free woman stands a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears
a condom, it's one in 50 million. He's more likely to be struck by lightning (one in 7000,000).

Female to male transmission is very inefficient, says Dr. Nancy Padian a professor in the
department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the University of California,
San Francisco and the author of a 1996 10 year study of HIV infected heterosexual couples, the
nation's longest and largest. She points out that "its two to three times easier for men to
infect women." But even so, if there are no other risk factors involved, the rate at which an
infected man will transmit the virus to a woman is one in 1,100 sex acts.

Today it's clear that the AIDS epidemic in the United States peaked in 1993 when 106.000 new
cases turned up [A & W note: The 106,00 new cases referred to above were added by reclassifying
past and present HIV positives under an expanded definition of AIDS instituted in 1993. This
broadened definition included more types of pneumonia, women with cervical cancer, and the
non-illness criteria of a lab test of 200 or less T cells that has since been the determining
factor for an AIDS diagnosis in at least 50% of all new cases. AIDS cases had actually leveled
off by 1992 and increased only due to the expanded definition, a fact omitted from this
article]. Then it began a slow decline and has now leveled off to 40,000 new cases a year.
Thanks to powerful anti-retroviral drugs that allow HIV-infected people to live longer, AIDS
deaths have plummeted 14 percent since 1998, falling in 2002 to a new low of 16,371.
[A & W note: The figure cited above of 40,000 new AIDS cases a year is an error. Rather,
official estimates claim there are 40,000 new HIV infections annually in the US. The notion
there are 40,000 new HIV positives each year however is derived from an unsubstantiated
estimate and calculated by dividing the high end total of estimated HIV positive Americans
(around 900,000) by the number of "AIDS years" (around 20). Also, the "powerful new AIDS drugs"
thought to be responsible for decreased deaths were introduced in 1996, not 1998 as the
articles states, which is a year after AIDS deaths had already peaked. Futher, there is still
no published data in the mainstream medical literature showing that these new drugs increase
life expectancy, improve clinical health, or prevent the illnesses associated with AIDS. And no
AIDS drug since 1986 has ever been tested against a true placebo control.]

Clearly, a single death from this illness is one too many. But AIDS is not killing Americans at
the levels of cancer (554,000 deaths in 2001), diabetes (71,000), or Alzheimer's (54,000). In
fact, the CDC has not put the disease on its list of the top 15 killers since 1998.

America may be winning the war on AIDS, but not without collateral damage. After two decades,
we are still overwhelmed with misinformation and misconceptions about how the virus spreads.
Straight men are still haunted by the notion that old-fashioned sex can be lethal. Among the
biggest fear factors, some AIDS educators say, is shoddy federal health data. The CDC
statistics are only good as the local health departments that gather them. But many of those
departments don't have time or resources for "surveillance" staff to investigate every person's
claim of how they contracted the virus. If a man wants to lie about having had sex with other
men, he can, and that makes it look like more people get AIDS from straight sex than really do.
By re-interviewing victims, their doctors, and their families, Chicagohealth officials found in
1997 that in 85% of the cases the city had blamed on heterosexual transmission, other risk
factors were present. This phenomenon became a source of black humor at New York City's
overworked health department in the late eighties. "What do you call a man who got HIV from his
girlfriend?" the joke went. "A liar."

The truth is out there, but its not reaching people who have been needlessly scared-the result,
some critics charge, of a conspiracy of silence. "It's not in anybody's interest to clear this
up," says Joseph Sonnabend, a physician who treated some of New York City's first AIDS cases.
Sonnabend, helped found what later became the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR),
But he quit the group in the mid-eighties when it claimed-falsely, he believed-that a
heterosexual epidemic could be coming. "Gay men don't want it fixed because they'll be blamed
again for the disease," Sonnabend says. "Charities like AmFAR don't want it fixed because they'
ll lose their funding. And "straight" men with HIV certainly don't want it fixed because then
everybody will know they've been having sex with men. Those are the ones who will scream bloody
murder if you print all this stuff. You're outing the poor bastards."

Any overhaul in America's AIDS policies has to begin with an overhaul of public perception away
from the anyone-can-get-AIDS mentality. That means looking at the cultural forces that
originally shaped that perception and continue to do so today. Many scientists now say that the
first major public awareness program, 1987's America Responds to AIDS campaign, was not only
largely wasted on mainstream America but deadly to those most at risk, drawing precious funds
from the very people AIDS was attacking: gays, bisexuals, drug addicts, and the poor.

Certainly the horizons of the AIDS epidemic were less clear in 1987. "With diseases like this
you're working with a moving target," says Walter Dowdle, who helped start the CDC's anti-AIDS
office. "We knew the groups hardest hit were gay men and drug addicts. But we didn't have a lot
of information about heterosexual spread."

Nevertheless, by 1987 the CDC knew that vaginal intercourse was an extremely inefficient way of
transmitting the virus. The agency had already produced research that showed the widespread
fears of contagion were exaggerated. Less than two months before it launched its AIDS campaign,
the CDC's epidemiology chief, Harold Jaffe, publicly criticized the everyone-gets-AIDS message,
noting the risk to straight America was "very small."

"People would talk about the hypothetical housewife in Des Moines," says Jaffe, now the
director of the CDC's AIDS-prevention program. "Was she at risk? The answer was 'not really,'
unless her husband happened to be a drug user or a bisexual."

In trying to address groups at risk-gay men and drug addicts-the CDC's Dowdle had already run
into political and cultural roadblocks. Broadcasters refused to carry announcements advocating
condom use. Ronald Regan remained infamously silent of AIDS almost until the end of his
presidency, and moral objections led his White House to quash the publication of a 1986
brochure prepared by the CDC that touted condoms. "We were getting virtually nowhere with the
Regan administration," Dowdle says. "They paid no attention to it at all."

Congress, though, had become increasingly alarmed by the CDC's reports loudly disseminated by
gay activists and charity groups like AmFAR that AIDS was killing off straight Americans. In
1987, Congress ordered the CDC to send out a nationwide mailing to educate Americans about the
dangers of AIDS.

Dowdle, who was put in charge of this mission, knew that mainstream America cared little for
the plight of drug addicts, prostitutes, and homosexuals. William F. Buckley Jr. had suggested
that anyone with HIV be tattooed to protect the healthy. Liberace died of the disease without
ever admitting he had it. When Americans were asked by Gallup pollsters if AIDS was God's
punishment for immoral behavior, 43 percent of the respondents said yes.

There was only one way to make all Americans concerned about AIDS: Put out the word that the
disease was an equal-opportunity killer, one that could get your best friend or your mom.
Otherwise, straight A