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Comment by wycs | Hacker News Reader

You claim the majority of HIV patients in the United States are heterosexual. Do you have any evidence of this? It cuts against everything I have ever read on the topic and everything I and other people in this thread can churn up.

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Not in the United States - but it is my understanding that AIDS is common in heterosexual people in areas hardest hit, like sub-Saharan Africa. Some countries have infections as high as 20%, which seems very likely to include more straight people than gay people.

The United States only has a fraction of the world's HIV or AIDS cases, so it seems plausible that worldwide straight people could still represent the majority of cases.

It does seem difficult to get reliable estimates outside the US & Europe, though.

You are 100% correct, apologies. Even so, be careful to extrapolate to the rest of the world and the odds are not such that you can make it seem as though HIV is a gay/drug user condition and that the rest of the population can ignore it, anything but and such thinking would inevitably lead to the pendulum swinging the other way again.

Publicly adjusting your beliefs in response to evidence is super rare and and extremely important skill. I really respect that you took the time to do this throughout the thread.

Reminds me of GDPR threads.

I would say that so far what I wrote there has been spot on. The sky didn't fall, nobody got sued, all the fear mongering was for naught.

Definitely true!

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