For someone who tries to project a measure of authority on the genesis and spread of AIDS, Ake, you don't really know diddly-squat about epidemiology.

In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Europeans presented Native Americans with the gift of smallpox. Native Americans returned the favor by giving the Europeans syphilis. The European explorers brought it back to Europe, where it spread quite rapidly, and became known as "the French disease," more because of the stereotype of the French being particularly horny, whereas the disease was mostly likely brought back by the Spanish. But it would have been equally dumb to have called it "the Spanish disease."

("How do you know you have the French disease?"
"I can tell by its accent!")

"AIDS" means "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome," which one catches through being infected with the HIV (the Human Immunodeficiency Virus). It is neither HIV nor AIDS that kills. HIV, as described in my post above (you did read it, didn't you?), was transmitted from African primates to humans. It is not specifically a "homosexual disease" any more that syphilis is a "French disease. Get that straight!

AIDS does not kill. What it does is shut off the immune system, leaving one defenseless against any contagious disease that happens to come along. It's not unlike going onto the internet with no firewall or anti-virus software. You might get away with it for a time, but sooner or later, you're going to get got by whatever comes along. And once you have something, you don't have a functional immune system to fight it with.

And I have already outlined the means by which HIV is transmitted—not necessarily through sexual activity and not necessarily from male to male or female to female—but through contact with an infected person's bodily fluids, particularly blood.

So to single out homosexual males as the sole vector of the AIDS virus means, not that you are barking up the wrong tree, but that you have selectively chosen one single tree to bark up out of an fairly large forest.

(Shite!! Why do I even bother!??)

Don Firth