More Fake AIDS Statistics
Friday, December 4th, 2009Speaking of numbers, Park La Brea News/Beverly Press reporter Amy Lyons apparently smoked a little too much Sustiva at West Hollywood’s World AIDS Day celebrations. In this week’s issue, she quoted Aid for AIDS Director Brenda Goodman as saying:
“In California, we have lost more than 86,000 friends and loved ones. This is unacceptable.”
By any count, 86,000 is a big number – so big that I went back to this published AMA report on infectious disease during the 20th century.
In it, the researchers not only found infectious disease was statistically irrelevant by 1960, but that during the height of the AIDS pandemic in 1996, no more than 15 per 100,000 people died from AIDS. Unlike the AMA, the CDC only posts estimates.
To be generous to Amy, Brenda and the CDC, let’s assume than HIV remained at its pandemic peak of 15 per 100,000. Extrapolating JAMA’s 15 to Brenda’s 86,000 would require a population of more than 573 million residents. Since the US only has about 305 million residents and California only about 36 million, it seems that Brenda’s estimates are probably off by ~81,000:
360 X 15 deaths per 100K = 5400
These numbers are consistent with those reported in South Africa and Australia. In Italy, officials waded through the unsupported estimates and concluded that HIV infections were well below those numbers and limited to a handful of IV drug addicts.
Whether Ms. Goodman’s number is 5000 or 86,000, the fact that 81.2 million Americans have died from all causes since 1980 puts her numbers into a clearer perspective.