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"Africa is both the epicenter for the disease, and is a poverty-stricken continent where people need to have families, and relatively large ones at that, in order to be taken care of in their old age. These features are sufficient to explain the sustained high infection rate without resorting to the racist twaddle you're apparently peddling. "

Oh boy, you're so full of bullshit.

"Medical experts have shown a clear association between HIV exposure and coerced sex. Wives who suffer violence if they request condom use or faithfulness are at higher risk of AIDS than unmarried women and girls. That is why defeating the AIDS pandemic requires a second radical proposition: that African women and girls have the right to protection under their own countries' laws.

Why is this concept radical? Because public justice systems in many AIDS-burdened countries are broken or virtually inaccessible to poor girls and women. Rape and beatings are simply the norm, and deterrence and accountability for these crimes in Africa is as rare as AIDS drugs used to be."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/13/AR2006081300716.html

"Rape, including child rape, is increasing at shocking rates in South Africa. Sexual violence against children, including the raping of infants, has increased 400% over the past decade (Dempster, 2002). According to a report by BBC news, a female born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped in her lifetime than learning how to read (Dempster, 2002). When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, there were already 18,801 cases of rape per year, but by 2001 there were 24,892 (Dempster, 2002). Numbers vary by different institutions, but are nevertheless extremely troubling. The Institute of Race Relations found that more than 52,000 rapes were reported in 2000, and 40% of the victims were under age 18 (du Venage, 2002). The University of South Africa reports that 1 million women and children are raped there each year (South Africa: Focus on the Virgin Myth, 2002)."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444213
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/april/virgin.htm

Also, big families don't cause rape, you can't catch an infection from a clean partner no matter how many times you have sex.

>For fuck's sake, 40% of the male african population still thinks that raping a virgin can cure aids!

The prevalence of that belief itself is actually a bit of a myth. The article you link to even gives a rebuttal that sorta covers that subject.

Africa has many problems, but that particular one, though it does exist, is not a fundamental one.

For fuck's sake, 40% of the male african population still thinks that raping a virgin can cure aids!

South Africa does NOT, repeat, NOT, represent the entire continent of AFRICA.
40% of SOUTH AFRICANS != 40% of AFRICANS. Jeez, where did they educate you?
//Mumbling to self about kicking the nuts of ignorant /. posters//

The numbers say it pretty clearly, but the poorer you are the more kids you have (which seems extremely backwards, but it's true).

No, it's not extremely backwards. The poor are more likely to be bored and horny and have nothing to do but screw. And they're less likely to be educated about things like birth control and STD spread as well.

For fuck's sake, 40% of the male african population still thinks that raping a virgin can cure aids!

I won't say that it's wrong to think about birth control, but abstinence is at least a free way to do something which may explain why it was first used (beside religious considerations).

I won't say it's wrong to think about abstinence, but time and again we've seen that abstinence doesn't happen. Abstinence-only education actually makes it MORE likely, not less, for kids to engage in early/promiscuous sex.

The far better way to deal with it is first to see about improving the education of women in the developing world (educated women typically have fewer kids). And improving their wealth potential thereby leading them into population growth reduction in the same pattern as the developed world.

The problem is, the more backwards a society is, the (generally) more backwards their attitude towards women. The status of women's rights in most of Africa, most of the Middle East/Asian Muslim nations, and non-"large city" area South American countries (to say nothing of those fucktards in the FLDS in America/Mexico/Canada) is the trend. Want to know where the largest population boom areas are in India? Yep, they're in the poor caste areas. Want to know where the population growth is in Afghanistan? Just follow the sound of wife-beating.

What is needed is a combination of steps. Yes, it's harsh to suggest to people that they shouldn't have kids. Yes, you'll have those who push back on you. The problem we are addressing, though, is that currently the way to "get by" for the poor is to have kids. In "developing" nations, kids = little workers for your farm. In "developed" nations with a nanny state, kids = government support check for those who are living on the dole. And I don't mean people who are temporarily unemployed here, I mean the women (because the dads run the fuck off first chance they get) who start having kids at 15-16 years old and who have multiple kids without ever knowing which of the guys she was fucking around with that year is the father.

Oh, and before someone screams "racist" at me... I'm talking about the trash that showed up on our doorstep after Katrina just as much as I'm talking about the white trailer park trash. Same patterns. Race doesn't enter into it.

Better article says:

  The inside of the tea bag material is coated with a thin film of biocides encapsulated within minute nanofibres, which kills all disease-causing microbes.
  The bag is filled not with tea leaves but with active carbon granules that remove all harmful chemicals, for instance endocrine disruptors.
  Each "tea bag" filter can clean one litre of the most polluted water to the point where it is 100% safe to drink.
  Once used, the bag is thrown away, and a new one is inserted into the bottle neck.

Sounds good, but doesn't remove fine particulates or heavy metals, so you have to prefilter and chose your water source wisely (check arsenic contamination maps....)

They're worse. Why let the white man inject something into your blood when you can just cure AIDS by raping an infant?

There's a myth going around africa, or at least some of the countries in africa (and having found a link it appears a lot more than just africa) that sex with a virgin will cure AIDs... As a result of this there are many many young women who have been raped by an AIDs suffered who have subsequently contracted the disease.

Does compute perfectly, just because it hasn't happened to you does not mean it hasn't happened.

http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/april/virgin.htm

Education is pointless when the gay community is beset with people that feel AIDS is just something that happens to you. I'm not saying the folks with the "gift giving" and "bug chasing" mindsets are all that common, but come on! Treating it with privacy, secrecy and protection isn't sensible either - people that have it can spread it, and they do. Sometimes intentionally. If we treated people infected with AIDS as we treated people infected with syphilis 200 years ago we would be much further ahead of the game.

AIDS is primarily a behavior-driven problem. It is harder to cure than syphilis but just as behavior driven. Most of the people that got syphilis before 1900 died from it in one way or another. And it wasn't pretty. However, syphilis wasn't viewed the way that AIDS is today because it was pretty clear how not to get syphilis even in 1700. It is just as clear today how not to get AIDS. Why is the infection rate 100 or 1000 times what the syphilis infection rate was, even factoring it by population?

Until we can convince people that it isn't fun, necessary or invitable that they will get AIDS we aren't going to do anything about it in the US. Until incredibly ignorant people stop spreading silly lies about AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, nothing is going to improve.

Trying to frame this as a rich first-world vs. poor third-world problem is pointless. For the most part, drugs that allow infected people to live longer in some places are pointless. The point is to reduce the level of infection the same way it would have been reduced long before there were antibiotics or treatments for other diseases. Why aren't we doing that?

While that is true,I don't remember the Protestants telling their followers that condoms don't protect you from AIDS. Of course if they keep this up,we won't have to worry about the Catholics in Africa,because there won't be any left. I have seen photos of remote villages where there is no one left but kids...the adults all got AIDS and died. Of course the kids won't last either,because many adults believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS,which is why child rape is so high over there. Basically they whole place is pretty f*cked up already and the LAST thing they need is some religious nut of ANY faith telling them to avoid safe sex. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

"Last time I checked, Elephants were endangered."

UM..... No?

http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2004/september/el ephant.htm

Either you haven't checked recently or you went to public school.

It's hard to learn if you don't have food in your stomach:

http://www.frac.org/html/federal_food_programs/pro grams/sbp.html
http://www.schoolsk-12.com/parents/Breakfast-Pays- Big-Dividends-in-Boston-Schools.html

Some great examples of technological innovation putting food in peoples stomachs:

http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2004/september/re frigeration.htm
http://www.fullbellyproject.org/index.asp

I've also read that the pot-in-pot refrigeration allows children to go to school, as they don't have to go to market to hawk their families produce everyday. The technology didn't make the creators all that wealthy, but everybody who uses it is hugely better off; in fact, more 'wealthy'.

Personally, I think the most universal measures of 'good' are wealth and self determination(freedom, liberty, whatever). A man who wakes up in the morning secure in his person, health and future has it all. The rest is just details; capitalism turns out to be a pretty good way to allocate resources(it rewards success, which is as good a way as I can think of to create more success.), and education tends to be a pretty good thing too, because it makes people more able to become self sufficient.

Actually, they're a tried and true medical treatment that's still used today. Specifically for warding off necrosis in damaged tissues. Mind you, it's not bloodletting, but still used.

Maggots too.

Quick article

i really hate it when people get high and mighty and give glib "it's so easy" responses to pandemics.

while the "1,2,3" reasoning may work in the States / West (and that's a *big* may), i encourage you to find the nearest fireman and borrow his 'jaws of life' so that your head may be removed from your own ass. take your little "changes to social norms", board an airplane, and tell it to the raped and abused the world over.

fucking prick. seriously, what mods posted this arrogant shit insightful?

Since there is no way to test for a god ID cannot be a theory since the definition of a theory requires that what a theory proposes be testable in some fashion. In fact, you state as much. In your own words:

but science is a series of tests and experiments... Science is the scientific method, and anything that doesn't fall within the scientific method isn't science.

That is why the theory that everything revolved around Earth was found to be wrong even though the Catholic church sanctioned it and threatened Galileo with excommunication (or worse) for stating that his observations contradicted the former.

See the difference? The previous concept was a theory because it was testable. Even though the church didn't want to accept the fact that it was wrong it didn't change the fact that the Earth was not the center of the universe and did in fact revolve around the Sun.

As far as your attempt at using leeches (the correct spelling) to show how things that were used in the middle ages (and longer) are now being used in modern medicine, you failed. Today, thanks to science, we know that leeches can be used in certain circumstances to help one recover from an injury. However, that is not the same thing as was done in the past. In the past leeches were used to by physicians to balance the humors and to rid the body of the plethora. Again, superstition and ignorance about how the body actually works compared to scientific observation and discovery.

As far as global warming is conerned, it is a fact. What is in dispute is if man is having an influence.

Here's the biggest problem that people don't seem to be grasping. Theories start with a fact. Those theories then attempt to describe the fact using proposals that are testable. For instance, gravity is a fact. You drop something and it will fall. The Theory of Gravity attempts to describe how gravity works. This theory is testable and the observations of those tests agree with what the theory proposes.

In a similar vein evolution is a fact. The description of how evolution works is a theory. So far only one theory has proposed ideas which are testable. And it isn't ID. One doesn't include in a theory that a god is at work since there is no way to test for a god.

Lastly, so what if the current theory of evolution has gaps in it? EVERY theory has gaps in it. That is not a basis for discrediting a theory if all the other pieces of that theory are found to be correct.

That is the biggest problem with ID. Instead of saying, "This is where our ideas trump yours" supporters of ID resort to pointing out the flaws of Darwinian evolution as if that somehow makes them correct. It does not. You, the person saying that your idea is better than someone elses, must prove that your idea is better. To date, not once have the supporters of ID ever put forth any idea of why their concept should be taught. Not one. Instead, they throw up their hands and claim that it's too complicated to have been done by chance and so it must have been done by god.

That's not how science is done. As you yourself have pointed out, science is a series of tests and experiments.

Independent thought is great. We need more independent thought. But simply clamining an article of religious faith as a scientific principle only serves to drag mankind backwards.

what is significant about the ability to drink milk during adulthood?

Most of the world's population can't digest lactose (milk sugar) after the age of about 4. The ability to digest lactose appears to have evolved along with dairy farming. Those parts of the world which did not practice dairy farming remain lactose intolerant.
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/june/lactose .htm

• Condon Report
• project blue Book
• More Blue Book
• Area 51 weather
• Alien Fish
• Deformed skulls

Sorry, I saw it on the CBC a few years ago, so I don't remember who did it.

However, I just googled myself, and found this one.

Here is the relavent quote from it:

Research by the MRC's PROMEC Unit indicates that patulin levels in apple juice made from conventionally grown apples ranged from 250-4000g/l. But in organically produced apple cider, a study done by other researchers has found levels of up to 45 000g/l.

Just FYI, the Google search I used was "apple cause cancer organic fungus" :D

yes, but only we in Africa are liberal enough to wholeheartedly support violent sex!