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Originally Posted by homeboy
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Originally Posted by Archaea
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Originally Posted by homeboy
OK, I'll stand up for hoyacoug. I agree that he went too far with the post Lingo refers to above. But he is generally articulate and knowledgeable and he researches many topics far more than most of us.
As for the AIDS in Africa topic today, I think he was dead-on. Yes, safe-sex would stop the epidemic, but due to the poverty, ignorance, culture, etc. described by hoya, that is not a realistic solution. At least not anytime in the near term. And numbers of people dying there and the numbers of orphans are truly horrific. This is one of the worst plagues in human history.
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It sure is, but there is no solution, if not for safe sex. If people say, well, we want a solution for unsafe sex, then maybe they're asking too much.
That's like saying, I want a safe solution for playing Russian Roulette. How much must society pay when people are unwilling to comply with the obvious solutions?
More money is spent on AIDS than on Cancer even though our AIDS death rates pale in comparison to the Cancer death rates. Do you know which cancer receives some of the lowest proportions in funding? Prostate. In comparison to breast cancer, it outspent 9 to 1.
We have many epidemic problems and AIDS should not be the number one priority that politics of sex has made it. |
You are making the common mistake of viewing AIDS through the lens of the U.S. experience alone. The AIDS epidemic in Africa completely dwarfs what we have experienced in the U.S. And in Africa it is spread almost exclusively through heterosexual contact.
In 2003, there were 25 million adults in sub-saharan Africa with AIDS/HIV and 12 million AIDS orphans. During that year alone, 2.2 million people died.
By comparison, there were about 40,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2003 due to breast cancer and 29,000 due to prostate cancer. Based on these stats, I think finding a cure for AIDS should be the top priority in terms of research.
That is not to say we shouldn't attempt education. We should attack the problem with everything we've got.
Links for the stats:
http://www.avert.org/subaadults.htm
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/co...he_Decline.asp
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/prostate/prostate.htm |
As a US citizen I'm not supposed to look at it from a US perspective?
Africa has so many problems, many of which are plain unfixable, why should we invest money in that if we can even fix our own problems?
I'm not trying to be inhumane, just pragmatic. Our funds are by definition limited.