Here's an item you might have missed on last night's evening news:
Whereas once [AIDS] was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.
Epidemiologist Dr Kevin De Cock said: "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia - China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn't look likely. But we have to be careful. As an epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be small outbreaks in some areas."
Anyone who read Michael Fumento's book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS knew back in the early nineties that media prophecies regarding the scourge about to be visited upon our planet by heterosexual AIDS was all hype and no substance.
AIDS was never a threat to the heterosexual population outside of Africa, but we were nevertheless assured by various government and gay rights organizations that it was so that we would continue to subsidize research into a cure. The AIDS lobby feared that if the general population no longer thought itself to be at risk AIDS would quickly come to be seen as strictly a gay problem and funding would just as quickly evaporate. They also feared that if AIDS was seen as a uniquely gay disease it would diminish sympathy for gays in society. Thus the need to keep anxiety about the threat high.
Fumento's book exposed all this for the scam that it was, but because the book was so far out of the PC mainstream many stores wouldn't even carry it. Fumento argued to much derision that unless one is a homosexual, a sex partner of bisexual men, or an intravenous drug abuser, one was more likely to get struck by lightning than to contract HIV/AIDS. Everything we know today about the disease vindicates his claim.
There's a good lesson here for those of us who may be prone to get caught up in the crisis du jour. There's always something that the left and the media are in a panic about and which portends the end of civilization as we know it, but which never seems to amount to anything. In the seventies it was (American) nuclear weapons, in the eighties it was AIDS, today it's global warming. What will it be ten years from now? The only thing I can say with relative assurance is that there will be something.
Be skeptical.
RLC