The Internet Causes AIDS

[Doug69]

Hey - look at this article - studies show that frequent Internet usage among gay men has been a leading cause in the surge of HIV infections, because gay men so frequently use the Internet to facilitate hook-ups that involve unsafe sex.

 

We better ban the Internet!!! Think of all the young gay men who are going to get infected with HIV if the Internet is allowed to exist. Don't you care about the health of gay youth? How can you knowingly promote something - the Internet - which has been proven to so directly result in more HIV cases?????? Have you no compassion?

__________________________________________________

 

Rise of Internet Fuels Fears of AIDS Resurgence

Tue July 29, 2003 10:33 AM ET

By Paul Simao

 

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A growing number of gay and bisexual men in the United States are engaging in risky sex with partners they meet on the Internet, raising fears that the AIDS virus could be poised for a major comeback in the group hardest hit by the epidemic.

 

Online chatrooms and Web sites are replacing gay bathhouses and sex clubs as the most popular meeting point to arrange high-risk sex, according to two new studies presented on Tuesday at the 2003 National HIV Prevention Conference.

 

The findings come amid growing evidence of an apparent resurgence of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as well as syphilis in men who have sex with men. The presence of sexually transmitted diseases is known to facilitate the spread of HIV.

 

New HIV diagnoses among gay and bisexual men have jumped more than 17 percent since 1999, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week. Some 850,000 to 950,000 Americans have the AIDS virus and approximately 16,000 die from the disease each year.

 

"It's clear we need to reach gay and bisexual men with appropriate messages, not only in traditional high-risk settings but also online," said Dr. Ron Valdiserri, deputy director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.

 

In one survey by the California Department of Health Services, 23 percent of gay and bisexual men infected with syphilis admitted meeting sexual partners on the Internet, compared to 21 percent who had done so in bathhouses.

 

MORE SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS

 

Researchers noted that men who met partners online, in bathhouses or at sex clubs tended to have more sexual encounters than those who did not.

 

A separate study by the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California in San Francisco found that 39 percent of gay and bisexual males interviewed online admitted having unprotected anal sex with someone they had met on the Internet in the previous two months.

 

Eleven percent of these respondents were HIV-positive. . . .

[Guest fukamarine]

>We better ban the Internet!!! Think of all the young gay men

>who are going to get infected with HIV if the Internet is

>allowed to more sexual

>encounters than those who did not.

 

The reason HIV is on the rise has nothing to do with easier hook-ups via the internet. It is all about a growing concensus that HIV is not as big a deal as it once was because if you do become infected it can now be "managed" with drug cocktails. Stupid reasoning in my opinion.

 

fukamarine

[+ deej]

Exactly. But the story is all over national news this evening.

 

Witch hunts usually start this way. Expect AOL to be MORE restrictive in TOS shutdowns. Sites such as this one will come under scrutiny.

 

It's flawed logic but it's salacious and therefore people discard logic and go on a "stamp it out" crusade. <sigh>

[FrancoDiSantisxxx]

Cause and Effect

 

If it is in a reputable (albeit undisclosed news source) and uploaded on the internet, it must be so. Just as it is so that Fox News Network causes more brain damage than Entertainment Tonight; Scientology Today is responsible for more cases of child abuse than Shakespere; and the Christian Science Monitor correctly predicted who the next four Calvin Klein underwear models will be based on investigative reporting into diaper practices in midwestern farm states for the next decade, although they barely beat out Agatha Christie's codicil to her long lost will.

[Doug69]

RE: Cause and Effect

 

>If it is in a reputable (albeit undisclosed news source) and

>uploaded on the internet, it must be so.

 

The news source was not undisclosed. It is called "Reuters", and it was disclosed in the very first line of the article which I pasted.

[Doug69]

>The reason HIV is on the rise has nothing to do with easier

>hook-ups via the internet. It is all about a growing concensus

>that HIV is not as big a deal as it once was because if you do

>become infected it can now be "managed" with drug cocktails.

>Stupid reasoning in my opinion.

 

YES PRECISELY. The reason HIV is on the rise among young gay men (and not so young gay men) isn't because of the Internet, or a lack of eduacation, or even because of Aaron's videos.

 

The reason HIV is on the rise is because lots and lots of peoople are choosing, with full knowledge of the risks, to take cum in their ass.

 

You may think it's a stupid choice - and if I were advising someone who wanted my advice, I certainly would do everything possible to try to persuade them not to make this choice - but the main reason, far and away, why people are getting HIV these days is because they are choosing to engage in the behaviors which they are well aware expose them to the virus.

 

Period.

 

Trying to identify anything else as the "cause" or as the "blame" for the increased spread of this virus - other than the choices which people are making - is to distract attention away from the real problem and to trigger what deej accurately (though ironically, given his blaming of videos for the problem) described as "witch hunts."

[Guest Merlin]

The "cocktail" has also created a fairly large group of gays who receive legal steroids, work out to preserve muscle mass, and who thus look quite healthy and hot. There has always been an intuitive feeling, hard to avoid, that if a guy looks healthy, he must be safe, but, as we all know, this is very wrong. There has been some thought that a guy on the cocktail with a very low viral load is less infectuous, or not at all. I have never seen any studies to confirm that, and it is a dangerous assumption.