What the hell's wrong with this woman? She's had little to worry about for most of her life, and she goes out her way to be stupid and mean. The worst thing is that she's alway, always irrelevant.

search google for "Rian Malan AIDS" and there are many discussions of dubious methodologies, and also rebuttals of Malan's writings by the World Health Organization, suggesting they feel there is something to debate:
http://tinyurl.com/c4zmp

[ 02 November 2005: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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Amiel's article is very light on facts and statistics, but that does not mean there is nothing at all to the story of sketchy AIDS statistics:

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Africa and AIDS are a mystery. You pour money in and matters get worse. For 20 years or so, this epidemic has been swallowing funds, medicine and attention and only getting bigger. Why? I don't see any convincing evidence that Africans are more sexually promiscuous than the sexually promiscuous West. They don't have more heroin addicts, probably far fewer. They may not have had condoms and safe-sex education 20 years ago, but once the pandemic was announced, the hills were alive with the sound of Trojans.

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If he stopped to examine these doubts, he (and his readers) would find them as thin as tissue paper. Why is the problem getting worse? It isn't. By some measures, it's slightly better. Why isn't it much better? For one thing, we are not "pour money in." The amount of aid, spread over a billion people, is quite small. But of course the author is trading on the racist myth that noble (perhaps naive?) whites are sending untold billions in aid to the third world.

Then he says that he sees no "convincing evidence" that Africans are more sexual promiscious. In the next sentence this absence of evidence has become a fact. Same with herion addiction. The same with safe sex. Totally ignored are issues like the prevalence of rape in the war zones -- or which Africa has many -- of child marraige, prostitution, and the lack of sex education or safe sex resources.

In short, his "mystery" is not shown to be a mystery at all, but -- and this is the clever part -- there's no time to develop doubts, because he's already moved on to his next unsupported speculative thesis:

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The motive behind the distortion of African AIDS reporting, if distortions there are, baffles me. Bethell sees it as political. Countries that once had some proper sanitation under colonial rule now give their citizens something akin to sewage to drink. Political correctness forbids laying the blame for this and resulting diseases on African independence. Heterosexual AIDS suits Western egalitarian fashions, I suppose. Meanwhile, pandemics in the Third World are building blocks for expanding public-health budgets at agencies like the World Health Organization. And, hell, it can't hurt to chin-wag with Angelina.

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This part of the article reflects the tactic of attributing one's more blantantly racist and unsupported views to another person. "Bethell sees it as political," and the author will tell you why, but he hasn't committed himself -- if he did, people might ask for proof.

In fact, there is no proof. The author (or "Bethell") provides three kinds of "evidence," although only two are explict: there is speculation that the definition of AIDS could allow false positives. Yet even if it could, there is no reason to expect that it does. Second, and the only evidence that doesn't warrent quotation marks around the word, is the assertion of "paradoxical population growth" -- millions are dying prematurely, but the population is still growing.

That's all he's got. Yet anyway with a passing interest in the large majority of the globe's inhabitants loosely termed the "Third World" knows that the pattern of large numbers of people dying from wars, disease and famine while the population as a whole explodes has been repeated over and over again -- it is the norm, not a suspicious exception.