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Comment by twofornone | Hacker News Reader

>It was the same with the aids epidemic, the gay community ignored/denied/downplayed the demographic localization of HIV but the truth was that at it's height if you were not a gay male the epidemic was effectively irrelevant to your life.

There are a hell of a lot of people - and a hell of a lot of people who have sadly died - who would be very surprised to hear this. It's a pretty accepted view by those that study the AIDS epidemic that calling it a gay plague caused massive problems for people who weren't gay and contracted HIV.

Singling out gay men for what you have decided are immoral behaviours is exactly why there is a stigma around HIV and why people continue to fail to seek treatment.

This is so true. What really terrifies me is if this new monkeypox became more easily transmissible and killed millions of people. Imagine the backlash against homosexuals?

...imagine the millions of dead people? What are you implying exactly, that if behavior from a protected class is the source of a major social issue/catastrophe, that we need to avoid making that link, and allow this class to continue engaging in antisocial practices, because we are worried about stigma?

That doesn't seem like a sane ordering of priorities.

I'd avoid making the link to "gay men", by highlighting the link to "promiscuity".

That's more strictly correct anyhow, and assigns causation to a behavior - where it belongs - instead of a vulnerable group.

This sort of wokeness is actually dangerous. 99% of the cases in the US have been linked to gay sex. In europe its been linked to a couple of raves involving the participants having gay sex. Its ok for health authorities and people to say "hey there does not seem to be a need to panic as we have identified the infection vector and its gay sex". It calms the general population and it arms the gay community with the knowledge that this disease is currently a risk for them. Why lie about the numbers in order to not hurt peoples feeling and expose people to real bodily harm? I am a relatively left leaning person but this constant insistence of altering the narrative to make people feel better is inane.

I’m more than mildly amused that you assigned the label “wokeness” to my position. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me :)

Would you mind specifying exactly what kind of “gay sex” might spread this - or any other disease - that does not equally apply to heterosexual anal or oral sex?

The number of heterosexuals engaging in repeated random anal sex with strangers is significantly less than that of the male homosexual population. But you're smart, pretty sure you already know that.

It's a numbers game. 83% of gay men report having more than 50 partners, majority of whom are strangers. 23% report more than 1000 partners. That last stat is hard to believe but this link [0] has many damning publications.

You cannot elevate protected groups above criticism. That's a dangerous privilege and as we see in this instance, condoning this sort of irresponsible behavior puts greater society at risk. Straight people on average are not having nearly as much anonymous sex with nearly as many partners and, ergo, not spreading nearly as much disease.

It's probably a manifestation of sexual dimorphism. The average woman is not as willing to sleep with a stranger. Not sure about how much lesbians get around though.

0. https://carm.org/homosexuality/statistics-on-sexual-promiscu...

> This information should be much more widely disseminated but woke politics are more important, apparently. I believe that's two epicenters now centered around promiscuous homosexual activity, one from a "sauna" (bathhouse) and another from a pride gathering(?).

I agree with you in broad strokes. The current outbreak does very much appear to be centered around a pride festival on Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, an exclave of Spain). The media doesn't seem to be talking much about that, which does seems likely to be because being seen as "blaming" it on that community in particular is culturally verboten.

That being said, you wrote:

> centered around promiscuous homosexual activity

... but the operative word there is "promiscuous", not "homosexual". If one or more infected people were involved in a "swinger's cruise", or one of the many "adult bookstores" common along US interstate highways, the result would have been the much the same. This appears to be primarily impacting the LGBTQ community, but it's not even close to problem _exclusive_ to the LGBTQ community.

Morality judgements aside, sexual promiscuity absolutely increases our society's potential exposure to blood-borne (and "bodily-fluid-borne") pathogens like this. If that's something that we're seeing as a societal trend, we should be cognizant of that potential impact, and perhaps there are some steps we could take to limit the initial spread of things like this and/or identify them sooner, before they become endemic.

Not quite. I grew up in Southern Africa where HIV/AIDS is still a massive problem today, and it was an equal opportunity disease unlike how it was in the West where mostly gay men were affected to my knowledge.

Sobering statistics include that according to a UNAIDS dataset sourced from the World Bank, in 2019, the HIV prevalence rate for adults aged 15 to 49 was 37% in Eswatini (Swaziland), 25% in Lesotho, 25% in Botswana and 19% in South Africa.

I know for a fact that in some South African provinces, this rate is substantially higher, and only increases further when you take into account racial demographics (HIV/AIDS is largely isolated to Black Africans, and is virtually absent from White, Middle Eastern, Coloured, East Asian, and Indian communities). Take for instance, KwaZulu Natal, where much of my extended family fled to after being unceremoniously booted out of Zimbabwe. The official rate is around 27%, but is likely underreported due to stigma, and furthermore increases when you consider it as a percentage of the Black African population living there (50%). If half of a given racial demographic lives with HIV/AIDS, you could hardly say that HIV/AIDS only affects gay people.

Furthermore, the explosion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was exacerbated by a former South African president by the name of Thabo Mbeki, who more or less adopted a policy of denial and herbal remedy. I would probably put the fundamental blame down though to promiscuity, lack of education, rape (Southern Africa is by far the world's dangerous region for women and boasts the highest rape rates in the world by quite a margin), and superstition (it's a common belief in Black African slums and communities that raping a teen virgin will cure oneself of the disease and rid them of bad spirits that cause it).

HIV/AIDS is a well-known societal issue in Southern Africa, and it is more or less drilled into the minds of everyone about the risks of contraction and the like. I am however, white, and of English descent. A Black African for instance would likely have a much more personal story about how HIV/AIDS destroys lives within the slums.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_South_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism_in_South_Af...

and in europe its been traced to two gay raves.

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