From: boyes@forty2.enet.dec.com (Mark Boyes)
Subject: Re: (4760) Re: The Big Number
Note: non-commercial reproduction.
Archive-Number: 4838
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 13:08:15 GMT

In article <1992Apr9.220320.7749@cs.ucla.edu>, trifid@agora.uucp (Roadster Racewerks) writes...
>It has been reported in the press here (Oregon) that the incidence is declining
>in the gay population, but climbing faster than said decline in the heterosexual
>population.

One factor to bear in mind here is that in the case of AIDS, if not HIV, 
people very often *die* of the disease and therefore leave the statistics:
the number of gay or bisexual IV drug using AIDS sufferers decreased
in 1990, according to last Septembers Scientific American. This does not
mean that there were no new cases and some recovered, just that more died
that year than manifested full blown AIDS.

Sorry if that last paragraph sounds patronising but it did not occur to 
me at first: I saw these graphs levelling out and thought "Things must
really be getting better!", then saw that one of the lines on the graph
was in decline and realised a graph of incidences against time does not
mean what I thought it did.   

In that particular high risk group obviously safer practices are a big
contributant too: and in terms of numbers rather than percentages there
are a lot more heterosexuals at risk of infection than homo- and bisexuals:
in my area of the country there are 8000 people HIV+, of which 2000 are
believed to be heterosexual. At ffirst glance this suggests that there the
heterosexual probelm is convergingg on the gay problem (yes, its everyones
problem, I'm talking statistics) although figures like '10% of people are gay'
lead one to ignore different statistics involving lesbians and bisexual
women, this figure still suggests that while 25% of the infected are
straight, a random gay man is at least *20* times more likely to be infected.
that a straight man. 

Oh well, here's a go at the calculation...

Figures assumed: all the gay people in the sample are male, incidences between
heterosexuals are split 50/50. 10% of the poulation is gay.Male population
of the area is X. Therefore 1000 straight men are infected. 

Percentage of gay men infected 100 * 6000 /(X * 0.1) =  6,000,000/X
Percentage of straight men infected 100 * 1000 / (X *0.9) = 111,111/X

Ratio gay male  : straight male    54:1 

Ratio gay woman : straight woman  0:1

This is a lot larger than I expected: perhaps the original report
included bisexual women under the 'gay' category even though they were almost
certainly infected through heterosexual sex (assuming sex was the cause of
the infection in *any* of the above cases: another assumption I did not 
explicitly make). 

Basically, statistics can give you wrong ideas. Including mine, which may well
contain arithmetic faults and wrong assumptions. Please correct me: please
don't flame me.

> I also read that the symptoms in women are significantly different
>than in men. Is this true, and does anyone here have a good list of same?

The only one I know is cervical cancer, which escaped detection as an 
indicator for a number of years due to pseudo-sexism: it is not an indicator i
in gay men so was not noticed.

Mark Boyes,   | Psychological Profile: Cpt. Hawkeye Pierce meets Binky Rabbit
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