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Point By Point: A Look At Paul Cameron’s Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do

Part 11: “The Pattern of Infection”

Gays Endanger Everyone

Jim Burroway

March 13, 2006

Having given the impression that gay men are infected with multiple dangerous diseases in overwhelming numbers, Dr. Cameron now starts to lay the groundwork for charging American gay men with infecting the entire world.

Unfortunately the danger of these exchanges does not merely affect homosexuals. Travelers carried so many tropical diseases to New York City that it had to institute a tropical disease center, and gays carried HIV from New York City to the rest of the world.27 Most of the 6,349 Americans who got AIDS from contaminated blood as of 1992, received it from homosexuals and most of the women in California who got AIDS through heterosexual activity got it from men who engaged in homosexual behavior.23 The rare form of airborne scarlet fever that stalked San Francisco in 1976 also started among homosexuals.10

10. Dritz, Selma K. Editorial: “Medical aspects of homosexuality.” New England Journal of Medicine 302, no. 8 (February 21, 1980): 463-464.

23. Cameron, Paul; Playfair, William; Wellum, Stephen. “The lifespan of homosexuals.” Paper presented at Eastern Psychological Association Convention (April 17, 1993).

27. Beral, Valerie; Bull, Diana; Darby, Sarah; Weller, Ian; Carne, Chris; Beecham, Mary; Jaffe, Harold. “Risk of Kaposi’s sarcoma and sexual practices associated with faecal contact in homosexual or bisexual men with AIDS.” Lancet 339, no. 8793 (March 14, 1992): 632-635.

Dr. Cameron appears to have mistakenly cited reference #23 when he should have cited reference #22:

22. Chu, Susan Y.; Peterman, Thomas A.; Doll, Lynda S.; Buehler, James W.; Curran, James W. “AIDS in bisexual men in the United States: Epidemiology and transmission to women.” American Journal Of Public Health 82, no. 2 (February 1992): 220-24.

Dr. Cameron’s unethical mischaracterization of legitimate research mixed with bogus data continues unabated in this section.

“Travelers carried so many tropical diseases to New York City that it had to institute a tropical disease center…” Dr. Cameron quickly inserts this small sentence into his pamphlet, implying that traveling homosexuals (and other dangerous and exotic visitors) were responsible for importing strange and exotic diseases into New York. But the truth is far more interesting than that. We turn now to a 2002 article written by Dr. Kevin M. Cahill (M.D.), director of Lenox Hill Hospital’s Tropical Disease Center in New York City — the very center that Dr. Cameron mentions.WWWW This article appeared on the Vatican’s Agenzia Fides news service web site, where the Tropical Disease Center is described as:

…a medical facility founded to care for missionaries before, during and after their tours in the tropics. Some 8,000 missionaries have been treated and enabled to return to their service of the Gospel.

So it turns out that those dangerous travelers were actually Christian missionaries, not diseased foreigners and homosexuals.

The details of the Beral, et al. study were first discussed here.

“…gays carried HIV from New York City to the rest of the world.” Dr, Cameron misuses the fact that Beral, et al. (#27) selected British gay men who traveled to New York City as one component of their research. From that single nugget, Dr. Cameron asserts that the entire worldwide epidemic was caused by gay men carrying the disease from New York City, a claim that Beral et al. simply doesn’t make.

The statement that “gays carried HIV from New York City to the rest of the world’ is probably the single most demonstrably false claim in the entire pamphlet. It goes against everything that everyone in the medical community has know since at least 1982, when one newspaper account noted that:

In recent decades, however, Kaposi’s sarcoma [a rare skin cancer commonly found among early Americans with AIDS – ed.] has been found common in Africa, mainly among young people. In equatorial Africa, it accounts for 9 percent of all cancers, and in some areas it is 100 times more prevalent than in the United States. The cancer has not been linked to homosexuals in Africa, and the reasons for its high frequency there are unknown.XXXX

This single clue, that many Africans have also been dying of the same rare skin cancer afflicting gay men in the United States, alerted health care officials around the world to a startling development that had been quietly taking place in western equatorial Africa — Kaposi’s sarcoma patients who also suffered from depressed immune systems. This disorder, which appeared to coincide with a startling rise in the number of Kaposi’ sarcoma cases, had been growing throughout the 1970’s but had been little noticed outside of Africa. In a continent of massive colonization and rapid industrialization, followed by wars for independence and mass migrations from rural areas to the cities, with malnutrition being common and safe drinking water sometimes hard to find, the gradual rise of large numbers of people dying of Pneumocystis Carinii pneumonia, tuberculosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, and generally poor immune systems might not have seemed so odd.

But if western doctors had been paying attention (and if African doctors had not been so overwhelmed), they might have noticed that something was seriously amiss in that troubled continent. Who knows how many thousands of men, women and children suffered and died through the decades before the deaths of five gay men in Los Angeles were reported in 1981.YYYY

Scientists now know that the HIV-1 family of viruses (the most common types of viruses responsible for AIDS throughout the world) is genetically similar to the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) found in a particular species of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes troglodytes.ZZZZ Those parts of west-equatorial Africa which experienced the most dramatic increase of Kaposi’s sarcoma coincide geographically with the habitat of this particular chimpanzee. The earliest confirmed case of AIDS is that an adult Bantu man who was living in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1959.AAAAA And by observing how HIV has mutated over the decades, scientists now believe that the virus “jumped” from chimpanzees to humans around 1930 (give or take twenty years).BBBBB

AIDS is not — and never has been — a “gay plague” (a term originally coined by the gay press in San FranciscoCCCCC). It is a worldwide tragedy that had been quietly simmering in an ignored continent for decades before garnering its highly-stigmatizing notoriety in the West. Anti-gay activists like Dr. Cameron have for too long exploited the misery and suffering of millions of people around the world and here at home in their demonization of gay men and women. But in that vein he continues…

Most of the 6,349 Americans who got AIDS from contaminated blood… received it from homosexuals…” Dr. Cameron offers no citation for this claim. None of the studies cited in this pamphlet offer any evidence for this.

“…and most of the women in California who got AIDS… got it from men who engaged in homosexual behavior...” He cites his own discredited obituary study (#23) to support this contention, but this attribution appears to be in error as his study doesn’t make any mention of this. Instead, it seems he got this from Chu, et al. (#22), which he doesn’t cite in the text of Medical Consequences, but includes in his list of references. He claims that most of the women in California who got AIDS got it from homosexuals, but the study reveals that this majority is very slight: 76 women who had sex with bisexual men, verses 73 women who had sex with intravenous drug users.

But what Dr. Cameron doesn’t tell you is that California was the only state in the U.S. and Puerto Rico where women who had sex with bisexual men were a majority. The authors state that “among 3,555 women with AIDS who acquired HIV infection through heterosexual contact (excluding women born in African or Caribbean countries), 11% (n=104) reported sexual contact with a bisexual man and no other risk factor for AIDS.” And notice that the authors excluded women who were born in Africa or the Caribbean, where AIDS is mainly a heterosexual disease.

The details of the Dritz editorial were first discussed here.

“The rare form of airborne scarlet fever that stalked San Francisco in 1976 also started among homosexuals.” Dr. Cameron returns to his scarlet fever scare in case we missed it the first time. But as we’ve already noted, the Dritz (#10) editorial provided very few details on the disease’s source or the reasons for its quick disappearance. Dr. Dritz noted that scarlet fever was detected among gay men, but she didn’t say that it started among them. She even noted that scarlet fever is not sexually transmitted. But it sounds scary, so Dr. Cameron brings it up again for further effect

At this point in Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do, Dr. Cameron has finished presenting his “scientific” evidence of the horrible things gay men do — and supposedly gay women as well, although there is scant evidence of “what they do” here. He concludes his pamphlet with some closing thoughts — and so do I.

Please continue with:

Part 12: Summary “Genuine compassion” and a false witness.

Notes:

WWWW. Agenzia Fides. “Malaria — our society of globalisation and info-technology fails to beat malaria.” Web site (June 28, 2002): https://www.fides.org/eng/sanita/malaria.html (accessed February 25, 2006). [BACK]

XXXX. Altman, Lawrence K. “New homosexual disorder worries officials.” New York Times (May 11, 1982). [BACK]

YYYY. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Pneumocystis pneumonia - Los Angeles” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 30 (June 4, 1981): 250-252. [BACK]

ZZZZ. Gao, Feng; Bailes, Elizabeth; Robertson, David L.; Chen, Yalu; Rodenburg, Cynthia M.; Michael, Scott F.; Cummins, Larry B; Arthur, Larry O; Peeters, Martine; Shaw, George M.; Sharp, Paul M.; Hahn, Beatrice H. Letter: “Origin of HIV-1 in the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes troglodytesNature 397 (February 4, 1999): 436-441. [BACK]

AAAAA. Zhu, Tuofu; Korber, Bette T.; Nahmias, Andre J.; Hooper, Edward; Sharp, Paul M.; Ho, David D. Letter: “An African HIV-1 sequence from 1959 and implications for the origin of the epidemic.” Nature 391 no. 6667 (February 5, 1998): 436-441. [BACK]

BBBBB. Zhu, Tuofu; Korber, Bette T.; Nahmias, Andre J.; Hooper, Edward; Sharp, Paul M.; Ho, David D. Letter: “An African HIV-1 sequence from 1959 and implications for the origin of the epidemic.” Nature 391 no. 6667 (February 5, 1998): 436-441. [BACK]

CCCCC. Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987): 97. [BACK]