The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: What Are the High Risk Groups for HIV/AIDS? Media & Politics (1990)

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Fumento is perhaps best known for his epidemiology work, especially infectious disease outbreaks. He argues that the perception of such outbreaks becomes exaggerated or otherwise distorted by those who exploit them to serve various agendas. In November 1987 he published a landmark article, "AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?" in Commentary that in 1990 became the basis of a controversial book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics He wrote dozens of subsequent pieces on the subject. In Commentary, he challenged the presumption that, as Life magazine's July 1985 cover declared in bold red letters, "Now No One Is Safe from AIDS." By 1987, the theme had become common. A January U.S. News & World Report cover story declared, "The disease of them is suddenly the disease of us . . . finding fertile growth among heterosexuals." A New York Times headline that month read: "AIDS May Dwarf the Plague," citing remarks of then-Secretary of Health and Human Services, Otis R. Bowen, that AIDS could be worse than the "Black Death", estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop made remarks giving rise to the term "heterosexual AIDS explosion." Oprah Winfrey told her audience, "Research studies now project that one in five -- listen to me, hard to believe -- one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years." Fumento challenged that orthodoxy, for which he and even those who wrote about him were condemned and even threatened. He did so by interviewing and citing the work of epidemiologists, including the top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) AIDS epidemiologist, Dr. Harold Jaffe, who told him, "Those who are suggesting that we are going to see an explosive spread of AIDS in the heterosexual population have to explain why this isn't happening." Although he would be accused of claiming heterosexuals have no AIDS risk, the back cover of his AIDS book states, "The 'myth' of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals get AIDS. They certainly do get it . . ." Rather, he argued that while white middle-class heterosexuals were the target of AIDS propaganda, ". . . the profile of the typical victim of heterosexually transmitted AIDS is a lower-class black woman who is the regular sex partner of an IV drug user." As of 2007, the CDC's "estimated numbers of cases and rates (per 100,000 population) of HIV/AIDS," was 60.6 for black women, while only 3.3 for white ones. In a theme discussed in Commentary and in his book, Fumento described various agendas served by promoting "AIDS hysteria". These included a media catering to its primarily white, heterosexual, middle-class audience and homosexuals and their sympathizers who believed the disease needed to be "democratized" in order to spur research funding. "On the opposite side of the spectrum Christian fundamentalists deploy it in order to underline their vision of morality," he wrote in Commentary. He also discussed this in a 1988 New Republic cover story. In 2010, the CDC reports, there were 12,875 HIV infections through heterosexual contact and 28,782 through male homosexual contact in the 46 states with confidential name-based HIV infection reporting. According to a Williams Institute review conducted in April 2011, approximately 3.8% of American adults identify themselves either as lesbian or gay (1.70%), bisexual (1.80%), or transgender (0.30%); which would correspond to approximately 9 million of adult Americans as of the 2010 Census. Michael Fumento is an American author, analyst, attorney, investigative journalist and popular speaker, currently residing in Colombia. A graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law and member of the Pennsylvania bar, he has a Bachelor's in political science from Fayetteville State University at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which he earned while serving as a paratrooper in the US Army. He embedded three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan and saw combat with the Navy SEALs and the 101st Airborne Division. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fumento