Note: General Sheehan Lies
Posted on | June 21, 2010 | No Comments
This article has been discussed elsewhere, including the invisible lesbians and ban on HIV-positive soldiers in the first place. I’m just posting this to point out that Sheehan’s assertion that “gay and bisexual men are 50 times more likely to have HIV than heterosexual men” is actually a blatant, bold-faced lie.
Don’t believe me? Check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actual data on U.S. men living with HIV. Even assuming that all those men whose risk factors included “male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use” got infected through sex, the numbers come down to:
Male to male sex: 218,134
Other: 153,176
I’d like to know how you get “50 times as likely” out of that!
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Edit: Further number crunching: calculating from the current population of the United States and assuming half of them are men and 37% of those men have had mtm sexual experiences (ref, ref), roughly 0.38% of American men may have got HIV from mtm sex, and 0.15% definitely got HIV from something else.
Granted, 37% is a high number, but that’s the only reference I could find for sexual experiences versus sexual identity.
Edit #2: National Opinion Research Center puts the figure of American men at who’ve had m/m sexual experiences at 4.9% which makes Sheenan’s number more plausible but still wrong; the way it crunched out for me was “28 times more likely”.
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