Telegraph: India forms new climate change body

Tucci (04:57:38) :
Haven’t done much work in infectious diseases, have you, Roger?

No. Thanks for asking.

Tucci (04:57:38) :
Since when has anyone skeptical of the AGW fraud ever had any cause to rely upon any someone “in authority” – i.e., a politician with no real priority other than getting re-elected or elected to a post of greater power – as a reliable indicator of factual reality?

Fumento isn’t a politician. Neither are all the public health officials and workers in infectious disease who once were but are no longer crying wolf.

To imply that because “no one in authority is making any public fuss about it now,” there is such low risk of heterosexual transmission that the risk is negligible is pretty much bugnuts.

Nonsense. The fuss hasn’t gone away just because there is no funding for public health warnings in the media. It’s because the experts in the matter have conceded that there’s no general threat.

WHO: No Heterosexual AIDS Pandemic
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/who-25-year-aids-campaign-was-misplaced
From the UK’s Independent:
The opening day of the 61st World Health Organisation (WHO) assembly on May 19, 2008 in Geneva.
Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits
A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts
By Jeremy Laurance
Sunday, 8 June 2008
A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.
In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.
Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.
Dr De Cock said: “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia – China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn’t look likely. But we have to be careful. As an epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be small outbreaks in some areas.”
In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which provides 20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was infected, mainly through injecting drug use, the same level of infection as in South Africa in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since risen to 25 per cent.
Dr De Cock said: “I think it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread.” …
Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.
Dr De Cock labelled these the “four malignant arguments” undermining support for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond Africa.
Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a weapon to stigmatise high risk groups, he said…
Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being spent educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far bigger impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing on interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk of infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.
There were “elements of truth” in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. “You will not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You need to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have not always been good at that.” …

Of course there’s surely still SOME risk of infection, but it’s 5% or less of the level we were warned about. That’s the point I was trying to make: That a vastly overstated alarmist campaign can, for a lengthy period, be supported by a massive consensus of experts, giving rise to the perception that only “deniers” and scoundrels would dare to question it. The experts can be massively wrong, even though no conspiracy or monetary reward is involved.

Tucci (13:28:45) :
Roger Knights seems determined to stay off-topic in a discussion of AIDS transmittal risks

Nonsense. I’m not prepared to follow you into an abstruse discussion of the medical details of the transmission mechanism that show that heterosexual transmission is possible. That was YOUR diversion. I don’t deny that there is some risk to heteros. Neither did Fumento. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia’s entry on his position:

Although he would be accused of claiming heterosexuals have no AIDS risk, the back cover of his AIDS book states, “The ‘myth’ of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals get AIDS. They certainly do get it . . .”

I’m trying to stay on the topic, which was: Is the threat of heterosexual AIDS within a mile of what we were assured it would be back in the 80s, or was it vastly exaggerated? Here are examples of the alarmism I mean, from a paragraph in Wikipedia devoted to Fumento:

By 1987, the theme [of AIDS alarmism among experts and scientific papers and those who quoted such sources] had become common. A January U.S. News & World Report cover story declared, “The disease of them is suddenly the disease of us . . . finding fertile growth among heterosexuals.” A New York Times headline that month read: “AIDS May Dwarf the Plague,” citing remarks of then-Secretary of Health and Human Services, Otis R. Bowen, that AIDS could be worse than the “Black Death”, estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop made remarks giving rise to the term “heterosexual AIDS explosion.” Oprah Winfrey told her audience, “Research studies now project that one in five – listen to me, hard to believe – one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years.”

Those were the claims. They were exaggerations by a factor of ten or 20. Or more. There was no risk of a pandemic, as claimed. Heterosexuals were not equally at risk as gays, etc., as claimed (though not in the stories just cited).

Tucci (13:28:45) : (even citing the UK’s Independent – which in describing the syndrome as “Aids” instead of correctly capitalizing the acronym becomes immediately suspect as technically unreliable)

Nonsense. It’s not that they’re ignorant that the term is an acronym, and that acronyms have heretofore been capitalized by convention. Rather, they’re following the new “down style” convention of recent decades, where only the initial letter is capitalized. For instance, computer languages that used to be all-caps are now usually initial-capped. E.g., COBOL is now commonly printed as Cobol, FORTRAN as Fortran, etc., even though these are acronyms. The ignorance in this matter is yours.

misrepresents me as having called attorney Michael Fumento … a politician.

Well, you called someone a politician and implied I relied on him. You wrote:

Tucci (04:57:38) :
Since when has anyone skeptical of the AGW fraud ever had any cause to rely upon any someone “in authority” – i.e., a politician with no real priority other than getting re-elected or elected to a post of greater power – as a reliable indicator of factual reality?

In what I wrote I nowhere relied on a politician in authority for my belief that AIDS alarmism had been debunked. The only person I relied on for that idea was Fumento, so who else could you have been referring to? Here are the relevant passages from what I posted:

Roger Knights: didn’t “science” endorse the alarmist myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS? … “science” can be hijacked and/or intimidated … Fumento’s book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” probably could give some idea. Apparently nearly all the most relevant scientific experts, pubic health officials worldwide, endorsed the myth, …

……………..

Tucci (13:28:45) : Now, Dr. De Cock in an infectious diseases guy with special training and experience in tropical medicine, but his purpose since taking over as director of the WHO’s Department of HIV/AIDS in 2006 has been “…to move toward trying to find rational regimens and get to one, or a few, regimens worldwide. So that someone in the United States would get the same drugs as someone in Namibia.” (interview published 11 June 2009)
………………..
I can’t fault Dr. De Cock for wanting more of those big taxpayer bucks turned toward increasing the availability of chemotherapeutic agents among the people of the Third World, …

Are you implying that he was speaking only on his own behalf (and in a turf-grabbing way moreover) in the statement I quoted and that the Independent incorrectly reported his statement as being an official report? Here’s what the newspaper said:

the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.
In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, …

If so, surely WHO issued a denial of the Independent’s story. Presumably it would be on their website. Until you find it, I’m going to continue to believe that this was correctly reported as being an official statement.

Tucci (13:28:45) : but what is spent on education in the First World countries to prevent HIV-1 transmittal is of substantial economic value relative to the costs of diagnosis and treatment, and it’s also valuable in that it reduces the transmittal of the old litany of venereal diseases as well as Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C.

Fine with me. Make condoms available widely and freely. Point out in public service ads that hetero transmission is possible, and that a little precaution can avoid it. Show scary movies to kids or on YouTube about what happens to heteros who have been careless and caught the bug. Just don’t employ exaggeration about hetero pandemics or hetero’s being at equal risk.

Tucci (13:28:45) : Rates of heterosexual transmission remain high enough to cause concern,

Oh sure. I’m not disputing that. But it’s counter-productive and wrong to “hype” or sex up” the level of concern. Once the public thinks you’re crying wolf, you’ll lose your credibility. That’s what’s happening now to the warming alarmists. They should have known better.