The Epidemic by Jonathan Engel

Author:Jonathan Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061856761
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE SCIENCE

By the time that Fumento penned his philippic, the preponderance of data lay in his favor. Despite the pervasiveness of the established orthodoxy, the “everybody-is-going-to-get-it-especially-your-grandmother” syndrome (in the words of the conservative National Review),38 almost all of the research trickling out of the nation’s epidemiological and infectious-disease laboratories supported the model of a far more limited heterosexual epidemic in America. By 1989, for example, the U.S. military reported that only 6,200 active duty personnel out of 2.3 million were infected with HIV, and the AIDS epidemic had had only “a minimal impact on overall DOD operations,” according to the General Accounting Office.39 The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, reported in 1993 that while AIDS would continue to grow, large portions of the population were “virtually untouched” by the epidemic, and would probably continue to escape its ravages into the foreseeable future.40 And in 1992, despite all pessimistic prognoses to the contrary, the number of teenage AIDS cases had actually dropped 5 percent. In response, the National Review pronounced that the myth of pandemic heterosexual AIDS was “collapsing.”41

One of the problems with the ongoing debate over heterosexual AIDS was in defining who constituted the “typical American.” Richard Nixon had famously asked if his policies would “play in Peoria” some 20 years earlier, indicating that a midsized midwestern American city still represented the archetypical American majority—predominantly white, almost entirely heterosexual, married, and neither very wealthy nor very poor. It was precisely to this America that so much of the AIDS awareness campaign of the past half-decade had been directed, and it was the misdirection of this campaign that had so enraged Fumento.

In an attempt to target this population, a team of researchers investigated sexual mores in exactly this population in the early 1990s by surveying the sexual practices of 334 randomly chosen households in two upper midwestern communities. Their results suggested that Americans were having less sex than most public health educators had assumed: a lifetime median of five partners for men and three for women. Indeed, only 17 percent of men and 9 percent of women reported having had more than one sexual partner in the previous year.42 The data, even if underreported, suggested that projecting homosexual practices on the heterosexual population of Middle America was absurd, as was developing AIDS infection models based on homosexual norms.

The second leg in the tripod supporting Fumento’s conjecture was the data on the intransmissibility of HIV from women to men coming out of San Francisco researcher Nancy Padian’s laboratory. Padian had been exploring the rates at which HIV passed heterosexually since the mid-1980s, and her work on the specific modes of transmission of the virus from women to men lent credence to the Fumento hypothesis. Padian had found that the virus traveled from women to men with great difficulty—only 1 percent of monogamous male partners of infected women in her cohort tested positive for HIV after several years of study (versus close to 20 percent for female monogamous partners of infected men).

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