Will half of all gay and bisexual men in the USA really be HIV-positive by age 50?
This is what I was told today in a message from Christian evangelist Peter LaBarbera, who was passing on another message from another Christian Evangelist Stephen Black, who was in turn referring to a wages-of-sin-is-death WorldNetDaily article by Matt Barber, who was in turn linking to a Wall Street Journal article by Drew Altman, who was in turn linking to a five year-old article in the journal AIDS and Behavior.
That may seem like a lot of degrees of separation from the original source of information to the person who rattled off this “fact” to me, but wait, we’re not done:
- It turns out that the journal article in AIDS and Behavior is not, as Matt Barber describes it, “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest assessment.” None of the eight co-authors of the article work for the CDC; most are members of a graduate department of public health in Pittsburgh. Nowhere in the published article is there any indication of an endorsement of the work by the CDC. AIDS and Behavior is not published by the CDC.
- Furthermore, the article isn’t original research; it is a review article that cites other research, making the information travel through six degrees of separation to get to me, and through seven degrees of separation to get to you.
- The article is an openly admitted “extrapolation” that doesn’t directly measure the portion of gay and bisexual men who are infected with the AIDS virus at all. It doesn’t even rely on other research that directly measures the portion of gay and bisexual men who are infected with the AIDS virus. Instead, the article takes indications of the yearly infection rate among young urban men drawn from a variety of studies, averages them together (even though the individual studies show drastically different estimates of infection), further hypothetically assumes that this rate is a sound basis for predicting the yearly infection rate, and projects what the overall total infection numbers might be if all these assumptions were true. In short, the article is a tentative thought experiment carried out by the authors, not firm knowledge.
- The extrapolated guess the authors arrive at does not derive from a representative sample of gay and bisexual men in the United States, but rather of young urban men, an unrepresentative group.
- Finally, the extrapolated guess regarding the volume of the infected includes people who are no longer alive.
What the authors of that article are trying to do may be important, but they theymselves write that “these findings should not be
generalized” out to the population of the United States as a whole. The assertions Christian evangelists are trying to make are not firmly tethered to empirical reality.
