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I don't think you fully appreciate just how complicated medicine is. There are a lot of factors in every disease and progress is necessarily slow.

As for factors, what you call "cancer" is actually a few dozen distinct diseases with similar etiology (DNA somewhere in some cell broke) but completely different presentations and treatments. What works for one does not necessarily work for the other. HIV is a retrovirus made of RNA and mutates constantly. There are two distinct strains and several different recognizable subgroups. The flu isn't a retrovirus but similarly mutates constantly. Every year we get a little genetic drift and every few years we get a genetic shift and we get screwed until it gets under control.

As for progress, the progress we've made is incredible in the last decades. Your comparisons are completely off base. If an electrical engineer lets the magic smoke out of a few components on a PCB he just gets new components or a new PCB. If a physician or medical researcher destroys a few organs in a patient he just killed a human being. You simply cannot move fast and break things in this field. Breast cancer (probably the best funded) survival is now over 90%. Want to see truly huge gains? Try leukemia.. HIV has improved, too. PrEP can prevent the spread and maybe in a few generations we won't have to worry about finding a cure for it because we have eradicated it like we did smallpox. Oh! Remember seeing that one recently? No. You didn't. Because vaccines have made it possible to completely eradicated diseases. Polio is only endemic in a handful of countries now. Why? Because medicine DOES work.

Maybe you're not happy with the speed of progress but that's because of your broken standards, not because we're moving too slow.

Some African economies have been doing well. Sub-Saharan Africa is devastated by AIDS. Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho are the worst hit with over 20% infection among working age adults South Africa is a close follower in those numbers: that's not a surprise, it borders on or actually contains those countries. That information is roughly 5 years old: I'm afraid that if it's gotten noticeably better, it's because many of the AIDS victims have since died.

The chart at http://www.avert.org/professio..., based on 2015 data, is also compelling. Sub-Saharan Africa is suffering very badly from AIDS. The attrition of the work force, and the cost of treatment to try and preserve the workforce, is devastating.

Sorry I was unclear: Yes, you are correct about the US. Most HIV positive people are males homosexuals, and that has not changed.

Looking at the world, it is not and has not been about gay men. Look at: https://www.avert.org/professi... . Most are in sub-Saharan Africa. Almost 5% of the population there is a carrier.

So your position is that the entire country (world maybe) should have access to identity information for everyone who currently has a potentially fatal, communicable disease? Knowing their email addresses would hardly be adequate to help people avoid the problems you describe, so you must (logically) be advocating for revealing actual names and work/home addresses.

Hmmm - so what other diseases should be accorded such special status?

Unless you have some kind of unseemly bias, you must be concerned about all diseases that are at least as communicable as HIV, and which cause at least that number of deaths - would that be a reasonable low bar for you?

So...let's see - in the UK, about 6,000 people die every year from HIV/AIDS - and about 25,000 die from influenza.

Oh [citation required] huh? OK - the numbers are here:

http://www.avert.org/uk-hiv-ai... (6,000 people died from AIDS in 2012)
http://www.theguardian.com/soc... (28,000 people died from influenza in just two weeks in January 2015)

How about communicability?

To be infected by HIV, you need to exchange body fluids - pretty unlikely to happen, statistically.
To be infected by influenza, you just need to be standing nearby when they sneeze - incredibly likely.

So - unless your position comes from a specific bias against HIV sufferers *because* of the most common routes of infection - you should reasonably be pressing the government to release the names of all known influenza sufferers instead.

I think we know what your feelings are in that regard - so we can only conclude from your post that it's pure, unreasoning bias.

Actually peak oil has happened. Why do you think you are paying $4 for gas, and we are drilling EVERYWHERE for the last dregs, not to mention trying to process tar sands. And why do you think economic growth worldwide sucks? Why do you think global oil production is in a downtrend?

1960's big freeze - I call bullshit. There was never a scientific consensus that this would happen.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

1970's - Ozone layer was preserved because of a concerted global response to remove the cause of it's shrinkage. Duh.

1980's - Aids has killed 15 million people. Go talk to people living in countries where it is pandemic and then come back and tell me nothing has happened.

http://www.avert.org/aids-impact-africa.htm

2003 - SARS. Please cite a claim that it was going to wipe us all out.

2005 - Avian Flu - ditto

2012 - Oh BS.

Alarmist predictions are made alarmist by news reporters. The actual predictions have been pretty much accurate.

http://phys.org/news/2012-12-pair-global.html

First, the test has been PROVEN to have a false negative rate of 7% outside of clinics. They need to address this issue, identify the causes, and fix them. The FDAs projections are that every year, 3,800 people who use this test and have HIV will wrongly believe that they don't. Want to do a body count projection?

Second, condoms work.

The male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.UNAIDS, WHO and UNFPA6

Also, you might want to buy condoms from outside the US. Other countries such as Canada have much stricter standards for breakage resistance. The FDA water test (10 ounces of water) is lame.

Spoken just like someone who isn't in a high-risk group, and doesn't really need a test.

Try being gay and living in one of those "abstinence-only" conservative areas where most Planned Parenthood type funding has been cut, and "gay outreach" testing programs are non-existent. This option is better than nothing; it may be the ONLY option available for some people.

Riiiight .... because condoms aren't an option - even though studies show they're the best way to prevent the spread of HIV to a partner. Gee, it's too bad that they're so hard to get. It's not like you can pick them up without a prescription, or anonymously from a vending machine, or at WallyWorld or the corner drugstore.

Better to give people a false sense of security with a test that will let 7% of people who are HIV positive think that they're not going to infect someone that they might care about.

7% false negatives is too high. Let them fix the bug in their product, because otherwise the alternative is going to be a lot more people catching a different bug - one that kills - because they think it's safe to forego protection.

we know exactly how to prevent AIDs

And yet there are 34 million people worldwide with HIV, including over 300k children, and the disease is still spreading. You may take that as "Well since it's preventable, I don't have to care" if you wish. The rest of us take that as "Still a major problem to be solved."

In South Africa (Where a lot of these funds will be used) 30% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in 2010 were HIV+. A lot of those children will be HIV positive. Even more of them would have been if not for the treatments and funding from organizations like the AIDS fund.

In 2008, almost six hundred thousand people died from AIDS in South Africa (That's 1% of the population, by the way, _in a single year_). The year before that? The same. And the year before that? Also the same.

(I was in the first responder community in south africa many years ago, and the only statistic more scary than the HIV+ rate among people admitted to one very large hospital was it's corresponding Hepatitus B rate)

With that in mind, do you see why I find your flippant comment just a little annoying and condescending?

From: http://www.avert.org/south-africa-hiv-aids-statistics.htm

I would have modded this as I have mod points...but there is no "WRONG" mod. Get a little education: http://www.avert.org/can-you-get-hiv-aids.htm

Evidence? (You must have some in order to validly say "objectively" here.)

3% failure rate,

How does "3% failure rate" count as "worse than AIDS"?

plus it prevents human life from being born in the first place.

It prevents human life from being conceived in the first place. That's not a bug, that's a feature.

Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all

So does choosing not to have sex. How far must people go to maximize the number of babies conceived?

And having more children can also reduce the resources available to your own or other people's children; shortening other people's lives, adding disease and woe to their lives, seems more than a bit selfish to me.

Also, I'd point out the example of Uganda- since embracing monogamy, their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms.

(1>0).

If you're looking at a single individual, maybe that applies.

Unless you treat the material quality of life as irrelevant (as "Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all" suggests you do), you then don't have 1 vs. 0, you have a number from, say, 0 to 1, and, if you look at humanity as a whole, you have the sum of all those numbers - and if you have finite resources to support human life, that puts an upper bound on that sum, so you then have to decide whether "more lives" or "better lives" is more important. When it comes to the abstract notion of hypothetical lives, I put "better lives" on top; better that fewer people are conceived and have better lives than that more people are conceived and have worse lives. Perhaps the sum of all qualities of life is the same in both cases, but, hey, it's now a two-variable problem, and I'm choosing to maximize "average quality of life" rather than "number of lives", given that I don't actually have to kill anybody to do that.

I'd point out the example of Uganda- since embracing monogamy, their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms.

Well, AVERT's page on Uganda says

It is likely that the number of new HIV infections in Uganda peaked in the late 1980s, and then fell sharply until the mid 1990s. This is generally thought to have been the result of behaviour changes such as increased abstinence and monogamy, a rise in the average age of first sex, a reduction in the average number of sexual partners and more frequent use of condoms.

which isn't quite the same as "their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms".

What if there is more than one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?"

You'd need extraordinary proof for that statement, since there's only one species.

...with only one allele of every gene, right?

Oops, sorry, no, there are multiple alleles, and some of them may result in different preferences and behaviors, so there's nothing at all extraordinary about different members of a species having different ways of living, each of which is in keeping with the individual's DNA.

Perhaps there's only one way of organizing a society so that those members can all have a way of living that's in keeping with their DNA, but if you have multiple populations with separate societies, and those populations have different frequencies of the alleles in question, perhaps one society's way will differ from another society's way.

Yes, indeed, there's no such guarantee. Tomorrow morning the Sun will probably still have fuel to burn, but, eventually, there's a good reason to believe it'll run out.

But the point is, you take that based o

... in the United States.

That's where you go wrong: compared to southern Africa, where about 1 out of every 5 adults currently infected, the 50,000 per year in the US is almost negligible. And in that population, about 60% of all adults with HIV are women and girls.

source.

That's just the USA, right? How about African regions?

http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/lecture/hiv5.htm

Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, there are an estimated 22.5 million (range: 20.9 million–24.3 million; 2007 figures) people infected by HIV with over 2.8 million new infections in 2006. In this region, there were 2.1 million deaths (figure 11 and 12). Ten million young Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 and 3 million children are infected. In contrast to western countries, young African women are more likely to be infected with HIV than young men. According to UNAIDS, 61% of HIV-infected people in sub-Saharan Africa are female and the gap is increasing. Women are being infected with HIV at an earlier age than men in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The differences in infection levels are most pronounced among young people (aged 15 – 24 years) with, on average, 36 young women living with HIV for every 10 young men in sub-Saharan Africa.

Check out this one:

http://www.avert.org/safricastats.htm

From 2008:

65,646 deaths of children age 0-9

http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-africa.htm

Sub-Saharan Africa is more heavily affected by HIV and AIDS than any other region of the world. An estimated 22.5 million people are living with HIV in the region - around two thirds of the global total. In 2009 around 1.3 million people died from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and 1.8 million people became infected with HIV. Since the beginning of the epidemic 14.8 million children have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS.1

The social and economic consequences of the AIDS epidemic are widely felt, not only in the health sector but also in education, industry, agriculture, transport, human resources and the economy in general. The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa continues to devastate communities, rolling back decades of development progress.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a triple challenge:

        Providing health care, antiretroviral treatment, and support to a growing population of people with HIV-related illnesses.
        Reducing the annual toll of new HIV infections by enabling individuals to protect themselves and others.
        Coping with the impact of millions of AIDS deaths2 on orphans and other survivors, communities, and national development.

Again, it's well worth finding a sure-fire preventive vaccine to protect everyone, regardless of whether or not you personally think they deserve it. Eliminating HIV is good for all health care workers who come into contact with HIV carriers, and for everyone else those health care workers come into contact with, everyone who uses public restrooms (due to the infinitesimal chance of contracting HIV from hard surfaces), everyone who might be a "good samaritan" and help someone at a car accident, a slip-and-fall, work mishap, etc., and for nice folks who have a lying, cheating husband|wife|bf|gf.

That's just the USA, right? How about African regions?

http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/lecture/hiv5.htm

Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, there are an estimated 22.5 million (range: 20.9 million–24.3 million; 2007 figures) people infected by HIV with over 2.8 million new infections in 2006. In this region, there were 2.1 million deaths (figure 11 and 12). Ten million young Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 and 3 million children are infected. In contrast to western countries, young African women are more likely to be infected with HIV than young men. According to UNAIDS, 61% of HIV-infected people in sub-Saharan Africa are female and the gap is increasing. Women are being infected with HIV at an earlier age than men in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The differences in infection levels are most pronounced among young people (aged 15 – 24 years) with, on average, 36 young women living with HIV for every 10 young men in sub-Saharan Africa.

Check out this one:

http://www.avert.org/safricastats.htm

From 2008:

65,646 deaths of children age 0-9

http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-africa.htm

Sub-Saharan Africa is more heavily affected by HIV and AIDS than any other region of the world. An estimated 22.5 million people are living with HIV in the region - around two thirds of the global total. In 2009 around 1.3 million people died from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and 1.8 million people became infected with HIV. Since the beginning of the epidemic 14.8 million children have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS.1

The social and economic consequences of the AIDS epidemic are widely felt, not only in the health sector but also in education, industry, agriculture, transport, human resources and the economy in general. The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa continues to devastate communities, rolling back decades of development progress.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a triple challenge:

        Providing health care, antiretroviral treatment, and support to a growing population of people with HIV-related illnesses.
        Reducing the annual toll of new HIV infections by enabling individuals to protect themselves and others.
        Coping with the impact of millions of AIDS deaths2 on orphans and other survivors, communities, and national development.

Again, it's well worth finding a sure-fire preventive vaccine to protect everyone, regardless of whether or not you personally think they deserve it. Eliminating HIV is good for all health care workers who come into contact with HIV carriers, and for everyone else those health care workers come into contact with, everyone who uses public restrooms (due to the infinitesimal chance of contracting HIV from hard surfaces), everyone who might be a "good samaritan" and help someone at a car accident, a slip-and-fall, work mishap, etc., and for nice folks who have a lying, cheating husband|wife|bf|gf.

1: Sex is not an issue. Encouraging children who cannot take care of themselves to engage in activity that could put them in the position of having to take care of children of their own is. It just doesn't make sense. It's like telling kids to jump out of a moving car whenever they want to, but it's ok if you are wearing a helmet.

2:I don't even know what in the hell you are trying to say there. It's not rational to encourage children to do things detrimental to their own health or well being. It's in intelligence saying let your kids become sluts for whatever reason. It is however intelligent and rational to encourage them to abstain for this behavior until they are older but at the same time prepare them for transgressions should it happen.

I do not know who lied to you but your fact 1 is just plain wrong. http://www.avert.org/std-statistics.htm

Fact 2: You most certainly can train children into not having irresponsible sex. You can also train them to taking the proper precautions too. However, That doesn't seem to be what you are after.

Fact 3: Again, what in the hell are you talking about? I do not consider sex as being bad at all. I consider encouraging children to have sex as being bad. I simply cannot understand why in the world you would want all the young people in the world to be exposed to potential VD, Aids, and various other health issues or pregnancy when they are not old enough to make informed decisions. Do you think that only liberal women used to having sex with anything will help your chances at getting laid or something?

It's like drugs and alcohol, you don't encourage kids to do them, but you instill enough sense in them to not do it behind the wheel of a car or in a crowded area or around dangerous machinery where they will or can cause problems.

Please explain your logic in why they need to be encouraged. It seems to me educating them on STDs, pregnancy, and other health concerns while discouraging the behavior is the best approach. Encouraging them in this behavior serves no purpose relating to the concerns there. All it does is create a sexually experience juvenile who instead of taking the 1 in whatever chance 5 times end up taking it 500 times..

BTW, the federal AOC of 18 is meant as a "safeguard" so no state could raise the AOC above 18. Many states have AOC of 17, 16, and a few even set it at 15. Here's a chart listing the AOC by country, as well as by individual US states: http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm

16 looks legal in, at least, some parts of .au.

IIRC, it was rather lower (14?) not too many years ago. (Someone will correct me on this whether I am wrong or not.)

Don't forget the 10% who are gay/lesbian and have no interest in what is most likely a heterosexually oriented dating service.

I think your figure is too high, it roughly corresponds to the number of people who say they have had a homosexual experience, but far exceeds the percentage who are exclusively homosexual.

It is if you're in Arkansas or other parts of the South or Mid-west where the age of consent is as low as 14 years old ... http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm

By the end of 1985, 20,303 cases of AIDS had been reported to the World Health Organisation.In the USA 15,948 cases of AIDS had been reported, and in the UK 275 cases. -- http://www.avert.org/aids-history-86.htm

In 1985 there was a reliable test for AIDS and 36,526 known cases worldwide. I stand by my original numbers of there being in the 100s of thousands of cases or less at the time.

Given that there are an estimated 33.4 million people currently living with HIV/AIDS in the world and millions of people dyeing each year. I also stand by my numbers of millions of lives saved. Could all HIV/AIDS infected people now be removed from population to limit the continuance of this virus? Not likely IMO, I feel it would certainly have been curtailable in the 80's though.

I don't do the fancy pseudo-math to fudge around with the margins of error to find the number of false-positive deaths as well as the number of false-negative slips, but I do guarantee that it wouldn't be 33.4 million living dead now.

Parents believe their kids won't have sex just like most children think their parents don't have sex.

It is often a very strange subject for either to discuss at home. My dad's whole discussion was: if you have questions, just ask me. I had obviously a bunch and still did not ask them. And that is why the school is a good place to discuss the birds and the bees.

And at the same time teach and educate about everything around sex. Explain why no means no. What to do if you are a rape victim (give out phone numbers where kids can phone in anonymously). The fact that men are visually and women are emotionally affected.

Sex-ed is good for those who have no idea. Look at some of the questions in teenager magazines (at least in Europe) When friends read that out to me they laugh. I feel sad, because those are genuine questions that would not have been asked if they would have been educated.

Interesting read: http://www.avert.org/learning-sex.htm

http://americanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/high_std_rates_abstinence_ed_link
http://www.newsweek.com/id/74005
http://gayteens.about.com/b/2009/11/17/rising-std-rates-linked-to-abstinence-only-education.htm
http://www.avert.org/abstinence.htm

Just a few links off the top google search results on the subject. While facts will certainly never really matter to people who feel so strongly in favor of religious indoctrination and against sex, it's certainly easy for the rest of us to see the obvious effects at work here. It's a lovely subject of discussion between fundamentalists and enlightened people, but for the sake of all adolescents who are just starting out on this whole sex thing, I'd rather see that relgious brainwashing stay out of sex education (or any form of education for that matter).

I wonder if developing countries are as paranoid about vaccinations as the 1st world ones are.

Many African Americans believe that AIDS was created in a CIA lab and is spread thru the use of vaccinations.

http://www.avert.org/origin-aids-hiv.htm

Africans think this is BS.

"Dr Chris Ouma, head of health programmes for the charity ActionAid Kenya, said that the claims “fly in the face of experience on the ground”."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article884626.ece

Here's some perspective from these two sets of statistics from the Guttmacher Institute. To give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume that every woman who claimed the reason for having an abortion was because of health risks or concern for the health of the fetus (~2%) had it after 19 weeks, and that the health risks, or health defects were all of the utmost gravity. For the sake of this argument we won't discuss anything before 12 weeks, although it is important to note that at 12 weeks the brain has already divided into 5 regions and has been developing as a cohesive whole for 5 weeks.
Now, there were 1.21 million abortions in the United States in 2005. That means that there were at least 111,320 (9.2% of 1.21 million) fetuses aborted between 12 and 19 weeks of development (more developed than this little guy). That's over 110,000 fetuses who are as able to feel pain as anyone else, and make facial expressions, being aborted every year with various descriptions of (in)convenience being the reason given by the mother.

In comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports the number of fatalities for 2005 (in the U.S.) involving alcohol was 17,590. The fatalities for all other accidents was 25,920. Pediatric cancer killed 2,200 children in 2004. Deaths attributed to HIV/AIDS for children and adults was 25,000 in all of North America in 2008. So the deaths attributed to all these hot-button issues combined is less than the deaths of fetuses.

Regarding the "they'll still do it no matter how strict the law" argument:
This argument only works on the premise that there is nothing wrong with the activity itself. For example, statistics demonstrate that men will still rape women, regardless of how harsh the penalty (even in countries where the penalty is death). Legalized rape means fewer women die, because the rapist will not feel the need to kill the woman to prevent her from reporting him to the police. Which do you want, brassy moral superiority and thousands of women dead, or an unpleasant feeling and those women still alive?

Do you see that just as you believe that rape is an intrinsically unacceptable act, and therefore there can be no justification for it's legal acceptance, so do the anti-abortion believers believe that the abortion of a fetus for the sake of convenience (being seen as murder) is an intrinsically unacceptable act?

http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm

Sure, the program does teach abstinence over condoms, it still teaches condoms

The only programs shown to actually prevent transmission and decrease infection rates are ones that aggressive promote condoms like in Thailand.

Bush only mentioned condoms once in connection with preventing AIDS (in 2004) while mentioning abstinence hundreds of times. Laura Bush did not publicly promote condom use until 2005 when it was obvious that abstinence only methods were failing.

I hate people that sit around and bitch about other people not doing more while they do nothing themselves!

I have donated hundreds if not thousands of dollars to AIDS prevention programs. When they spend the money in Africa I want my donations to go to Condoms and education on their use.However, a lot of that was wasted because, if the Africa AIDS programs wanted US Gov't $$$ (many orders of magnitude more than what I can afford to give), they *HAD* to teach abstinence as a primary form of prevention.

I don't mind abstinence being taught along with ALWAYS promoting condom use... but abstinence for HIV that the Bush's promoted works about as well as the abstinence for teens that Sarah Palin promoted.

Bush did more to stop AIDS in Africa than any person in the world, anywhere at any time.

Really! How? Did he promote condoms? I thought he was all about abstinence-only education

Sorry, but you've been misinformed. It's a lot more than abstinence-only education. Neither condoms nor abstinence will help you once you have AIDS. The don't do much against malaria either. From HERE:

The malaria program complements the president's largest global health initiative, the $15 billion, five-year plan known as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Under the program, about 800,000 Africans are receiving drugs that enable them to live longer with the disease and help to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus.

The plan you speak of is called PEPFAR (U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). What do they teach?

PEPFAR follows an ABC strategy through "population-specific interventions" that emphasise:

        * A bstinence for youth, including the delay of sexual debut and abstinence until marriage
        * B eing tested for HIV and being faithful in marriage and monogamous relationships
        * C orrect and consistent use of condoms for those who practice high-risk behaviours.

Most of the others are on the ball but here's a reference about the transmission of HIV-2, which is not the strain in the article

Who is a child though? Is a 15 year old a child? 16 year old?

Keep in mind that 15-year-olds are legally allowed to have consensual sex in quite a lot of countries. 16 seems to be the norm in the US alone with more than half the states putting age of concent at 16.

The scary thing about that is, that it is entirely legal for a 19-year-old to have sex with a 17-year-old (ages picked to keep the difference small), but if the 17-year-old has set up a hidden camera that the 19-year-old doesn't know about, they'll still be on the hook for creating child pornography.

I'm not picking on the USA in the scary bit. That's true of all the countries I know of, that have an age of consent below 18. I find it odd that you can do A completely legally - as long as it's not recorded in any way, shape or form. It's like "don't ask, don't tell" - only worse.

And considering the amount of hysteria surrounding child pornography, I wouldn't be surprised if it was illegal for a 17-year-old to make write about it in a diary.

Depends on the state. I'm not aware of any US state that has 14 as the age of consent.

Educate thyself: Various ages of consent.

14 is legal (possibly with some restrictions) in Iowa, Missouri, and South Carolina. 15 in Colorado. 16 in many states. The page states that it hasn't been updated in some time so the laws may have changed in the past few years; if you are considering visiting a high school, you should ask a DA, police officer, or the high school's principal for clarification and/or incarceration.

This page seems more up-to-date. Several foreign countries are as low as age 12, which is frankly a little creepy (although a female ancestor, 5 generations away I believe, was married at age 12).

I don't disagree with the above posters that the most effective situation is having a well-defined legal limit where people are deemed legally capable of giving consent.

But, as with several other issues of legislated morality, I think the USA generally gets the location of this line too far towards the puritanical, compared to many other developed countries. In my jurisdiction (NSW, Australia) the age of consent is 16, and it's pretty much a non-issue. I believe the appropriate ages are similar across much of Europe (see here for worldwide ages). People in their late 20s who sleep with someone who is 16 or 17 are creepy, not criminals.

By the time people reach an age of consent of 18, many of them will have been having sex for several years. Just the same as people will have been drinking for many years before they reach an absurdly high drinking age of 21. Or that people will gamble and visit prostitutes, even if those particular consensual adult activities are criminal in many US states.

Here is a website that lists all known ages of consent. It's easier to look up here.

http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm

Carry on mate !

I guess it is a _bit_ like proprietary drugs being sold to third world countries for ~10 times the price of the generic version. The generic version often considered illegal according to the original manufacturer...
generic vs branded

Real world DRM costing real lives.

That tidbit is still covered under the Apple's NDA until December 1st.

Hey twerp: the 1980s called, they want their slur back. Get with the present

What happens when someone with AIDS passes it along to their unborn child (a rare occasion now due to modern medicine)?

is unfortunately far too common in many parts of Africa. In western society, as you say, it's rare - but totally rife in other parts. I've read statistics that the HIV infection rate in some areas is over 20%.

Education, health care, etc may be the long-term answer... No one apparently is sure of a short-term preventative measure, though.

Minors having sex isn't a felony. The age of conesnt isn't 18 in every state, so for example in Alabama, two 16 year olds having sex is legal. And then in most states, there is a window where the 2 people have to be within a certain difference of ages, like 2-3 years difference.

A 16 year old looking at themselves in a mirror while nude is also legal. Being at a nudist camp with people under 18 is legal, in some states.

I agree that right now taking a picture of any of that is a serious felony, if it is determined to be "child porn". It shouldn't be, since self produced child porn shouldn't be illegal at all.

Which killed more AIDS or Communism?

I'm sure I could hazard a guess as to the annual death rates caused by the two factors - as of 1997, it was estimated that Communism had caused 97 million deaths - so around 1 million per year on average.There's not much Communism around anymore, so we'll take 1 million per year as a reasonable figure.

AIDS currently kills about 2.1 million people a year (as of 2007). If AIDS carries on for another 30 years, it will overtake Communism and then some.

So who's the partisan hack now, fuckwit?

Have you considered the possibility that you're a moron? If you want to go on a rant, you'd better make sure that the topics you bring up have any connection to reality. I mean it took almost five seconds to put "pretty baby amazon.com" into Yahoo and click on the first link in the results. Saying it hardly raised an eyebrow is in complete contrast to all the editorial reviews of the movie that state it was controversial.

Finally there is no single age of consent in America. There are a whole bunch of different rules as the age of consent is determined by the states. According to this chart, in general the US compares pretty much evenly with the majority of the world.

That's like three strikes right there. I guess you're out.

Since 2000 the annual numbers of AIDS diagnoses have been relatively constant, with an estimated 37,852 in 2006. That's people DIAGNOSED, not deaths.

Some 43,443 people were killed on the highways in 2005.

Meanwhile, 559,312 people who died from cancer. Cancer is only the second biggest killer, heart disease kills more people of ALL races. More black people die of cancer than all races combined die of AIDS.

HIV is comparitively a very minor threat, even to minorities, compared to other dangers. If you're talking about dangers to minorities you should be talking about incarceration, as a disproportionate number of our prisoners (more per capita than any other country) are minorities.

Since 2000 the annual numbers of AIDS diagnoses have been relatively constant, with an estimated 37,852 in 2006. That's people DIAGNOSED, not deaths.

Some 43,443 people were killed on the highways in 2005.

Meanwhile, 559,312 people who died from cancer. Cancer is only the second biggest killer, heart disease kills more people of ALL races. More black people die of cancer than all races combined die of AIDS.

HIV is comparitively a very minor threat, even to minorities, compared to other dangers. If you're talking about dangers to minorities you should be talking about incarceration, as a disproportionate number of our prisoners (more per capita than any other country) are minorities.

This is just as much about adults as it is about kids. Most humans have urges to have sex they can't hold indefinitely. Abstinence will prevent HIV, STDs and unwanted pregnancies in theory, but it is impossible actually to put into practice. Do you actually know anyone who will abstain from sex their whole life ? And if you are talking about abstinence before marriage, as is apparently taught in some places, that excludes a whole category of people who can't get married - gays, and who are most at risk for HIV. Also, some straight girls who pledged to remain "virgins" before marriage have substituted intercourse with other even higher-risk behavior like anal sex because they just don't know any better.

What we need a comprehensive sex education program that focuses on safe sex, contraception, and preventing STDs/HIV. I don't think abstinence should deserve more than a footnote in such a program because we already know teaching it alone doesn't work.

Note that 16 states have already rejected funds for abstinence-only education, the most recent of which being Arizona.

FYI :
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/21606.php
http://www.avert.org/abstinence.htm
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/221980
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2008/01/ariz-gov-napoli.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26623-2004Dec1.html

Most patents on AIDS drugs have already been,
in some sense, revoked in Brazil, on the ground
of "compulsory licenses" as sugested by
international patent agreements in situations
of public emergency.

Links I was able to find in English about AIDS
in Brazil (the first is very interesting, it
shows the history of how Brazil has been dealing
with AIDS since dictatorship times in the '80s
until today):

http://www.avert.org/aids-brazil.htm
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/aids/brazil

Actually, in most US states, the age of consent is lower than 18, usually 16 or 17. See this table. In fact, many states have a range, based on the age of the other party.

Now many people think that 18 or 17 or what ever may be too high of "do not cross" line, but I think that everyone agrees that there should be some line. I mean, whatever your age, should there ever be a time when it is ok to have sex with a 9 year old? How about 10? Try coming up with an age that way, especially if you have a daughter, as most lawmakers do, and see what arbitrary age or range you come up with.

The "vaccine origin" theory has pretty much been shown to be impossible. There were too many HIV strains already around at that time for it to have originated at the Winstar trials in Congo. Winstar supposedly also went back and found some of the original monkey cells that the vaccine was grown in and upon testing showed that they did not contain any HIV and that they were actually Macaque cells which can't be infected by HIV. Plus add in that HIV1 and HIV2 are believed to be derived from different SIV strains which infect different primates, which further makes that impossible.

http://www.avert.org/origins.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiv#Origin_and_discov ery
http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/598BI O/498BIOonline-essays/hw3/files/HW3-Villa.pdf

According to Avert.org there are 39.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Let's round that up to 40 mil and say each one gains $100k for the drug company in question. That's $4 trillion in revenue for the company in question. Now let's presume that they make a vaccine and have that vaccine cost $10k. According to the US Census Bureau there were 242.4 million insured Americans in 2003, which is roughly 80% of America. Assume that a bunch of them don't want or don't get the vaccine for some variety of reasons. Let's say we end up with 200 million people who want the vaccine. That's $2 trillion in revenue -- for America alone. Canada, Great Britain, France, Russia . . . that $2T shortfall will be made up quickly. Furthermore, a whole generation will have to be immunized, since by these projections, the virus will be far from wiped out. (Note: If 95% of humanity as a whole got the vaccine, 95% of 6 billion paying $10k is a huge, huge amount of money, even if it's just one time only.)

If that's not enough to convince you it's very lucrative, let me point this out: there are SEVERAL pharmaceutical companies. If you aren't the one making the $100k/year treatment for AIDS, you really, really, really want a slice of that pie. If you can do it by curing the disease and making trillions of dollars, you certainly will.

And if several companies split the $100k treatment between them, it gets even more lucrative to have exclusive control over the vaccine.

This vaccine would be immensely profitable; nobody would pass it up. Not even the companies making the treatment.

The first cases of AIDS were associated with gay men

That is false. I think that you mean that the first cases detected were with gay's. The first cases were shown to come from Africa and traveled around via hetro sexuals. It was seen first in the gays, because of the liberal attitudes in bath houses of the 70's and our attitudes of gays back then (most were married).