By Jeremy Laurance
Sunday, 8 June 2008
The Independent

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

Forget the doctor's strangely coincidental name for a moment. Do we really need phrases such as "men who have sex with men" and "sex workers and their clients"? Would "homosexual males" and "prostitutes" have been considered inaccurate or offensive? These phrases are brought to you by the same people who replaced "personnel" with "human resources," and this type of language makes it difficult to take the article seriously. Political correctness is far from new, but I'll never get used to it.

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"

Behavior, maybe?