HIV/AIDS Shows Alarming Rise Among Asian American Women:
The increase in HIV infections has risen alarmingly among Asian American women, and will soon surpass the rate of infections in high-risk populations unless intervening measures are taken, noted a panel of experts here May 17.
The panel discussion was held at the San Francisco Public Library and organized by the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center to commemorate the seventh annual National API HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.
HIV/AIDS infections amongst Asian American women have risen by 14 percent since 2006, Stephanie Goss, a spokeswoman for the API Wellness Center, told India-West.
“Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that the HIV infection rate in A&PI communities will surpass that of Latinos by 2015 and of African Americans by 2020 if left unchecked,” said Tri Do, an assistant adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Asian American women will not have a higher rate of HIV infection than African Americans in 2020. I’m willing to bet, and so make, some serious money on that proposition. This is scare-mongering. For a good purpose, but still scare-mongering. If you start out at ~0%, the initial proportional rise may be very high indeed. Extrapolating it out is just stupid. In the 1980s some of my teachers actually implied that 20-30 years from now the whole world might be infected with HIV if we weren’t careful. In the 1990s some of my teachers implied that all Africans might be infected with HIV if they weren’t careful and we didn’t do something. Predicting stuff is hard, but straight-line linear projections are just retarded. As the “low hanging fruit” within a population is picked the rate of increase will slow down. Even in the worst case scenario remember that if a population is 90% infected its rate of increase in infection is going to be lower than a population which is only 0.5% infected.
Ah lot of the stuff in the world conforms to a logistic curve, where the saturation point is far less than < 1.0.