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Science 282(5395) 1790 (1998) squeals Centrist 1998 Official truth; Scientific American 279(1) 82 (1998) squeals Leftist 1998 Official truth on Official HIV infection statistics planetwide:
Science Scientific American
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Australia/New Zealand 600 12,000
North Africa/Middle East 19,000 210,000
Western Europe 30,000 530,000
North America 44,000 860,000
Caribbean 45,000 310,000
Eastern Europe/Central Asia 80,000 150,000
Latin America 160,000 1,300,000
East Asia and Pacific 200,000 440,000
South/Southeast Asia 1,200,000 6,000,000
Sub-Saharan Africa 4,000,000 20,800,000
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5,778,600 30,612,000
I declare HIV to be a minor, though potentially lethal and very Officially useful, disease unworthy of notice except as a public health nuisance - and that only in high risk populations like homosexuals and intravenous drug addicts. Losing those cohorts is a gain welcomed by any First, Second, or Third World society. HIV is not worth the money required to treat it compared to syphilis, gonorrhea, clamydia...
Most of that South/Southeast Asia ulcer festers in India where "among women who visited clinics for treating sexually transmitted diseases the figure is as high as 13.6%," though general adult population only assays at 2% (which hardly leaves any HIV infections to bother the rest of the geographic area - India hosts 1.1 billion East Indians). Faith will not save you, not even the 360 million Hindu gods. Keep close public health tabs on your economic keystone professional sex workers and drug abusers (if you care) as Thailand now does.
The Uncle Al Award for perseverative genital misuse goes to Sub-Saharan Africa. It is part of their culture. The historic solution to all African problems - famine, disease, warfare, natural disaster, abject incorrible stupidity - is reproduction. The idea of breeding around a veneral disease is quite heady.
Is a factor of five, Centrists vs. Leftists, "political exigency" or "experimental uncertainty?" Mother Africa has 55.5% (or 67.1%; close enough) of all Terran HIV cases bundled in a geographically isolated Third World peer group. The net effect of massive, widespread, untreated, and growing HIV infection upon Black African population growth rate is zero. It has not even slowed down their rate of increasing population increase. Glaxo-Wellcome was set to fund colossal importation of drugs to treat African HIV at a factor of ten cost below retail cost (recovering the difference out of you-know-whose pockets). Yeah, that will fix it.
Why fix it at all? It is not broken. Black African breeding masses no longer contain genomes susceptible to proximate HIV wrath. Babies born with HIV live into their 30s without medical intervention. This is more than ample interval to breed eight or tne surviving offspring and spread the disease, then evolution is through with you. African HIV itself has been recreated into a kinder, gentler pathology well suited to transmission and persistence among its hosts. HIV among Africans is like syphilis (the Great Pox when introduced from the New World in the 1500s) among Europeans. It certainly is not good for you, but the parasite has learned manners acceptable to the community.
Black Africa is not a formidable pan-African identity nation-state, nor is it an assembly of nations whose patriotic peoples sullenly stare over borders at each other. Black Africa is a Balkanized miscellany of tribes that never much progressed to written language prior to external conquest (conveniently consigning history to oral tradition and fraud) haphazardly parceled by European colonization and later home-ruled by despotic kindred (Idi Amin, Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Mobutu, Daniel Arap Moi, Robert Mugabe) when ruled at all (Somalia). The Garden of Eden advocates no responsibility for the future. It never has winter. Commonplace aperiodic natural disasters are lost in a haze of oral tradition and shamans shaking rattles at malevolent spirits. Africa's great resource (aside from the natural ones for sale to the highest bidders and bribers) is reproduction.
No parasite, disease, weather catastrophe, politically imposed famine, or virulent dictator has ever been so baneful that Black African loins have not procreated around the problem. Ten offspring/woman is not untoward, nor fifteen remarkable. Western concepts of monogamy and paternal familial responsibility are wholly foreign. Sub-Saharan Africans drop as many feeders as fast as possible and mostly leave them to their own devices to mature into breeders. The system has been fabulously successful, certainly when goaded with limitless food and medical aid from the compassionate (stupid) First World. Almost anybody can be a village sage at the cutting edge of zero technology if the competition is scaled down to proper expectations (celebrations of ethnic diversity: Indians on US reservations before gambling revenues or Black rap music pandering Inner City boorish masses).
The functional solution to HIV is to let it run its course. Concerned societies sequester susceptible citizens from harm by law, custom, morals, education, public health, self-interest, and dispassionate culling of the bell curve tail of incompetence. Natural societies deal with perplexities naturally, with full Gaian compliance (life nasty, brutish, and short). For the one to impose upon the other is unconscionable cultural aggression, and a genuinely adverse discounted cash flow/return on investment scenario.
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