Remember when AIDS first became known in the early ’80s? Little was known about the disease then, but it was apparent, at least in the U.S., that a disproportionate number of gay men were contracting the disease. The activist gay community tried to spin the facts but facts are quite stubborn. Even today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men who have sex with men account for 71 percent of male HIV cases in the U.S. Roughly 13 percent of AIDS cases involve illegal intravenous drug use. About 15 percent of the cases are chalked up to “high-risk heterosexual sex.” The CDC’s definition of “high-risk heterosexual sex” is “heterosexual contact with a person known to have, or to be at high risk for, HIV infection.”
In other words, high risk means heterosexual sex with someone who is either bisexual or an intravenous drug user.
Well over 99 percent of all AIDS cases in the U.S. are caused by risky or downright stupid behavior. AIDS is the single most preventable deadly disease known to man yet it receives more federal research dollars than all cancer research combined. To put it another way, we invest about $16,700 to find a cure for each life lost to prostate cancer, more than $21,800 for each life lost to breast cancer, and about $160,000 for each life lost to AIDS. The activist AIDS lobby has been quite successful in convincing a large number of lawmakers that AIDS is a threat to everyone in America. It isn’t. AIDS is only a great threat to you if you engage in irresponsible and risky behavior.
You would hope we would learn that lesson after almost 30 years of empirical evidence. We haven’t, and now a new and deadly disease is emerging from the gay community which could very well spread into mainstream society. It’s called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA for short. This drug-resistant infection has a death rate of between 16 and 27 percent and that figure appears to be rising. Research shows that it is 13 to 14 times more prevalent in gays than in the general population. Despite this high risk in the gay community, the news media are once again trying to diminish the impact gay men have in spreading this disease.
The horror is that, unlike with AIDS, transmission of MRSA is possible through casual contact such as high school wrestling matches or basketball games?anywhere skin comes into contact with skin. MRSA, until recently, was confined primarily to hospitals. Now it has been unleashed on the general population but is most prevalent in areas with high concentrations of gay men.
Dr. John Diggs is an internationally recognized infectious disease specialist. “The particular ZIP codes looked at were ones that were associated primarily with men who were having sex with other men, the Castro district in San Francisco and also a healthcare center called the Fenway, here in Massachusetts, in Boston,” Diggs told cnsnews.com.
The Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group, has gone ballistic at suggestions that gay men could be spreading another deadly disease. HRC President Joe Solmonese said in a press release, “We saw this kind of hysteria in the early 1980s around HIV/AIDS, and I’ll be damned if we will sit idly by in 2008 and let them perpetrate that type of anti-gay hysteria without calling them out on it.” Mr. Solmonese, we now know the truth about HIV/AIDS and how it’s spread. I’ll be damned if we’ll sit idly by this time while you and your co-conspirators put the rest of us at risk.
Phil Valentine is an author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host with Westwood One. For more of his commentary and articles, visit philvalentine.com.
