Well, the other figure you need to look at here:
about 80% of folks that are HIV+ know it--and most of those folks will not play with folks without informing them. However, there is a minority of people that will not inform partners-and some of those folks are obsessed with having as many sex partners as possible.
Now, as far as testing goes, anyone who has tested negative the last 3 months is markedly safer than folks from a comparable population all things considered. Assume you have someone that is fairly sexually active, say 7 times per week-and they have a high risk pool of partners, say 10% are positive and they never use protection of any type. Their chance of getting infected in the last 3 months is only around 2%-if we assume a 1 in 500 chance of infection. Now, the problem is that folks are especially contagious for HIV right after infection. I'm not saying that testing is a silver bullet here. It just is one important tool in the arsenal of prevention(and one that gets downplayed quite a bit-and one for which there are some good recent technical advances).
Anyhow, I don't disagree here. The pool of folks that are open to casual sex without looking at test results may well be higher than the 3-5% cited in that article. Now, I would also expect a lot of those 3-5% to be folks like IV drug drug users or partners of those folks. Some folks might think they can spot IV drug users by looking at them. I tend to remember what a principal at a private boarding school told me. No matter how long he had that job, he was always surprised at just who the IV drug users he found were.
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Originally Posted by SnowwwWhite  The statistic you quote says that 3 to 5% of people living in DC have HIV. Does that mean of every man, woman, and child or does that mean every man and woman in their most sexually active years?
Statistics have a way of being molded for the purpose of the person trying to make the point. I'd be willing to bet that the HIV percentage is much higher than 3-5% if you exclude the young and the old from the final figure. If that is correct, the chances of contracting HIV would be significantly higher because the exposure risk is spread only among the most sexually-active population.
Personally, to really assess the risk of random casual sex, I'd prefer to know the statistic for only people 20 years younger and 20 years older than myself. I know it's not the most scientific way to look at it, but it would be a more realistic assessment of my personal risk.
Erase the segments of the population who are truly monogamous (what, maybe 25% of the total?) and then you have an even higher established risk.
Erase the segment that has just tested negative in the preceding month (and assuming you are about to play with someone who hasn't been tested recently) and you can keep going higher and higher with that HIV positive number.
Just some thoughts. |