http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...5E1702,00.html
US AIDS numbers 'undercounted'
From correspondents in Washington
May 08, 2004
DEMOCRATIC US politicians said today the federal Centres for Disease
Control (CDC) and Prevention was undercounting HIV cases across the
United States by refusing to accept data from California and other
states that don't record patients' names.
Fifteen lawmakers, including California Senator Dianne Feinstein and
Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, released a letter to CDC
Director Julie Gerberding urging her agency to accept data from states
that, for privacy reasons, track HIV cases by alphanumeric codes.
The method is used in 14 states including California and
Massachusetts, as well as in the District of Columbia.
"CDC's refusal to accept and utilise code-based data presents an
inaccurate picture of the nation's epidemic and, in doing so,
undermines the national effort to win the battle against HIV/AIDS,"
the letter says.
The undercounting will become an issue if the federal government
starts using HIV infection data to determine funding levels for
programs to fight AIDS and HIV.
Presently, the government uses data about how many people have been
diagnosed with AIDS - as opposed to how many have the HIV virus that
causes AIDS - to decide how to distribute money.
A decision is due in July from the Department of Health and Human
services on whether to make the change for the main federal law that
funds HIV and AIDS health services.
"PaulKing" <aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote...
I've been saying for some time that the HIV/AIDS numbers are being
twisted for a variety of agendas. Sometimes they are inflated so
as to get increased government funding, other times they are
deflated so as to not offend the sensibilities of certain special
politically-correct groups (blacks, homosexuals). While not the
outright lies Winston invented for the Ministry of Truth in "1984,"
they are serious distortions designed to confuse the reader and
sway him towards an agenda (i.e. so he will favor increased federal
funding or believe that blacks and homosexuals are at no more an
increased risk for AIDS than whites and heterosexuals). And just
like in "1984," both are often presented simultaneously, with the
reader being expected to accept both contradictory sets of
statistics without questioning the validity of either.
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"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while
telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions
which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in
both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while
laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that
the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was
necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the
moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and
above all, to apply the same process to the process itself - that was
the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then,
once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just
performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use
of doublethink."
-- George Orwell, "1984"
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