Post: #1

http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticp...a-20130627

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 44 percent of all new HIV infections are in the African-American community. And keep in mind, black Americans make up only 14 percent of the population. But yet their infection rates are eight times higher than the rates for white people.

Also vid: http://video.pbs.org/video/2254967747

Post: #2

Interesting. Are there numbers that show the breakdown by income? That would show how much is behavioral and how much is genetic.

Post: #3

Why is it so high? Frontline is a great series but I can't sit here and watch the episode.

Post: #4

(06-27-2013 10:38 PM)houston Wrote:  Why is it so high? Frontline is a great series but I can't sit here and watch the episode.

Probably a lot of downlow shit in prison.

This series is going to scare off the non-black girls I approach.

Post: #5

(06-27-2013 02:06 PM)j r Wrote:  Interesting. Are there numbers that show the breakdown by income? That would show how much is behavioral and how much is genetic.

Not really, given the ample collinearity between behavior, genetics, and income.

Post: #6

I need to catch up on the latest research, but I suspect after everything's said and done that it will be found that blacks are disproportionately susceptible at the genetic level to contracting HIV. If that's the case it's an unfortunate historical accident that the disease just so happened to hit that part of the world.

I do know that the rare group of people who are effectively immune from getting HIV are mostly Caucasian. About 1% of people of European descent have two copies of a version of the CCR5 which confers virtual immunity from ever getting HIV, let alone AIDS.

Maybe 10-14% of white people have one copy of the CCR5 varient, but that does not seem to be sufficient to confer immunity. Still, one suspects that genetics like this, and not just behavioral patterns, help explain the differential spread of AIDS.

Link

Post: #7

(06-27-2013 10:38 PM)houston Wrote:  Why is it so high? Frontline is a great series but I can't sit here and watch the episode.

Homophobia is rampant in the black community.

Rather than be gay, black guys stay on the down low. They then bring the HIV home to their women.

In the white community, gays keep HIV to themselves for the most part.

Post: #8

(06-27-2013 11:04 PM)MikeCF Wrote:  

(06-27-2013 10:38 PM)houston Wrote:  Why is it so high? Frontline is a great series but I can't sit here and watch the episode.

Homophobia is rampant in the black community.

Rather than be gay, black guys stay on the down low. They then bring the HIV home to their women.

In the white community, gays keep HIV to themselves for the most part.

Homophobia was pretty widespread in the white community as well through the 1980's, let's not forget. Put it this way - are blacks today more homophobic than whites in 1985?

Anyway, if you look at the extremely low rate of HIV infection in North Africa and the Middle East, it becomes harder to blame wild hatred of homosexuality. Frankly, I think that more conservative sexual mores would have stymied the spread of AIDS, as it indeed seems to do in Islamic countries. Note that Muslim Africa directly abuts regions with higher rates of HIV yet the disease does not advance much beyond the Islamic firewall.

Parenthetically I hate the PC word homophobia more than I hate gays.

Post: #9

(06-27-2013 11:08 PM)Therapsid Wrote:  Homophobia was pretty widespread in the white community as well through the 1980's, let's not forget. Put it this way - are blacks today more homophobic than whites in 1985?

Anyway, if you look at the extremely low rate of HIV infection in North Africa and the Middle East, it becomes harder to blame wild hatred of homosexuality. Frankly, I think that more conservative sexual mores would have stymied the spread of AIDS, as it indeed seems to do in Islamic countries. Note that Muslim Africa directly abuts regions with higher rates of HIV yet the disease does not advance much beyond the Islamic firewall.

Parenthetically I hate the PC word homophobia more than I hate gays.

Probably.

Also, whites in the 50s were probably more conformist and less likely to act out their urges with other men.

I hate the word homophobia, too, but we all sorta get what it means.

Incidentally, this issue has been pretty thoroughly discussed in the black community. There are lots of black men on the down low.

http://www.bgsu.edu/downloads/sa/file14305.pdf

Also, 70% of blacks voted to ban gay marriage in California (Prop 8):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/20...can-a.html

Many believed that the high rates in support of gay marriage resulted from angry black women acting out against a group of people that "stole" so many of their men.

But this stuff is hard to really talk about. It's not PC to ever say blacks engage in any sort of bad conduct.

Hell, you're saying that blacks must have some mutation in their DNA that makes them get HIV rather than look at well-discussed sociological factors.

So the truth on this issue is very hard to get at.

Post: #10

Variation in polygyny between populations is a worthwhile candidate as a driver behind the variation in STD rates between populations.

The STD rate in America is higher for blacks than whites than Asians.

The historical breeding ratio of females to males for West Africans, Europeans, and East Asians has been 1.4, 1.3, 1.1, respectively; that is, Africans have been historically more polygynous than Europeans than East Asians.

Since pretty much all human behavior is heritable to a certain extent, we would expect that people of West African descent are more polygynous than those of European descent than those of East Asian descent. While, obviously, all human populations are polygynous--it's all relative. Paternal investment rates across and within nations reflect that, with people of African descent being lowest in investment and East Asian the highest, with European descendants in the middle.

A stylized, simplified model (well, more like an example of a point in said model):

In a perfectly static, monogamous population, if 10% of the men had STDs, they could only infect 10% of the women--since intercourse-pairings are 1 for 1.

In a very polygynous population, where 100% of the women only bang 10% of the men, if 10% of the men have STDs, they could potentially transmute that to 100% of the women.

Post: #11

(06-27-2013 11:04 PM)Therapsid Wrote:  I do know that the rare group of people who are effectively immune from getting HIV are mostly Caucasian. About 1% of people of European descent have two copies of a version of the CCR5 which confers virtual immunity from ever getting HIV, let alone AIDS.

Holy shit! And to think I used to laugh at my black sergeant who angrily told me that AIDS was engineered by 'the white man' to kill Africa...