?In the future, we journalists should not compromise ourselves in seeking truth and should not let those who feel that they are the keepers of truth manipulate us in the way that they are doing now. We must no longer believe in an AIDS virus that supposedly has magic powers, that mutates, that every time they use a new antiretroviral the virus uses its magic powers to resist.? ?Both scientific and popular literature have exaggerated the significance of the number of women with AIDS, and of the epidemiological danger of sex for women. Variations on the theme ?women are the fastest growing risk-group for AIDS? appear virtually everywhere, in the scientific no less than the popular press. Sometimes these statements are literal untruths; at other times they merely insinuate untruths in their equivocation between rates of disease and rates-of-change in population-specific disease rates. For example, the medical journal The Lancet asserted in a 1993 article that ?Women are the fastest growing group with HIV infection in the USA.? But the basis for this claim is obscure. Estimates of the prevalence of HIV infection are well-known to be unreliable, and have been continually revised downwards.? ?For all the same reasons that other people lie to doctors about stigmatized activities, such as male-male sex, women with AIDS lie about use of injected drugs. It therefore seems highly likely to us that a substantial number of the reported cases of heterosexual transmission in the partners of injecting drug users, in particular, are themselves