AN OPEN MIND

Update on the stats behind the HIV stats. Can’t find them anywhere on the web. One of the researchers has invited me to go to San Francisco to sit down with him and go over them, but as yet, hasn’t shown me the analysis or directed me to where it can be found. A respected AIDS journalist emails to say that the timing of the announcement is suspicious: “It’s been my observation that alarming reports of HIV surges tend to pop up about a week or two before either a big AIDS Conference or a significant deadline in the federal budget process. Just so happens that the Retrovirus Conference opens in Chicago this weekend and, of course, one presumes Bush is putting his first budget together now.” The last report of this kind from San Francisco calculated HIV-transmission rates in part by analysing whether there are employment discrimination protection for gays, domestic partnership provisions, and so on, in any given area. Quite how these would help one figure out HIV transmission rates is beyond me, and I look forward to seeing the logic. But the b.s. detector bell is ringing off the hook.