AIDS boondoggle

Happy Monday!

What follows is some disjointed mental meanderings...

Well, the Aids conference held in Canada is over. Deep Breath. What a mess this seems to be.

The devil is tapdancing in some pretty high places it would seem by some of what has surfaced in the "fight against AIDS"

I've heard it called a pandemic. What is a pandemic? Answers.com (the first definition that showed up) says this:

Widespread; general.
Medicine. Epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the population: pandemic influenza.
n.
A pandemic disease.

The Spanish Flu of 1918-19 is listed as a pandemic. It killed 20 million people world wide in ONE YEAR.

AIDS deaths worldwide since 1981 (that would be twenty five years) is 25 million, according to AVERT.com. Another site says 20 million, yet another 23 million.

Let's say that there are 900,000 deaths each year since 1981.

This is what the WHO says about cancer rates worldwide:

Cancer by the Numbers
Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide, accounting for 1.2 million new cases annually; followed by cancer of the breast, just over 1 million cases; colorectal, 940,000; stomach, 870,000; liver, 560,000; cervical, 470,000; esophageal, 410,000; head and neck, 390,000; bladder, 330,000; malignant non-Hodgkin lymphomas, 290,000; leukemia, 250,000; prostate and testicular, 250,000; pancreatic, 216,000; ovarian, 190,000; kidney, 190,000; endometrial, 188,000; nervous system, 175,000; melanoma, 133,000; thyroid, 123,000; pharynx, 65,000; and Hodgkin disease, 62,000 cases.

How come AIDS gets as much attention as it does? It isn't such a big deal compared to cancer.

We hear a lot about AIDS prevention. Usually, the other word seen with that is 'comdoms'. Condoms are too porous to stop a virus. There has to be something better than that.

There is.

Uganda managed to get it's AIDS rate down below 6%. The employed the chastity principle. This is, I believe the best progress yet made. Ah. Yes, but chastity is so unpopular! And no one makes much money off of it. And by golly, it calls for self control. Can't have that!

If all these people talking about AIDS really cared about lives, they'd do what worked.

I think there's an agenda or two, or ten, at work. Apparently sex trade workers (I think we used to call them prostitutes?) used the opportunity to ask for more rights or something. Huh?

I guess I get tired of the shrillness, the intolerence that seems to be associated with this movement. We need to find treatments for those who are ill, but also, we need to prevent this disease.

I guess I'm not the only one. Tony Clement said there was no point saying anything at the conference. He said it was not a place for rational discussion, and that it had become too political.

When will there be rational discussion? The Catholic Church is very active in hospices which help people dying of AIDS and other diseases. They are also promoting prevention by calling for chastity. This means abstinence from sexual relationships if you are not married, and faithfulness to ones spouse if you are married. Oh, and of course to be married means that there is one man and one woman involved.

The Church is more than willing to help those attracted to members of the opposite sex develop a lifestyle of chastity. There are many who have done it and continue to do it.

But it still comes back to self control, doesn't it?