SIDA: quelques chiffres qui mettent les choses en perspective

La 16e Conférence internationale sur le sida se déroule présentement à Toronto. À entendre les porte-parole officiels et groupes de pression, nous sommes tous à risque de contracter la maladie et il s’agit de l’épidémie du siècle. Ce matin, dans le National Post, Michael Fumento, l’auteur du livre The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (1990), nous donne quelques chiffres qui mettent les choses en perspective.

• According to Health Canada, AIDS (which peaked in 1993), was diagnosed in only 272 Canadians in 2005.

• Regarding specific risk factors, about 38% of new AIDS cases were among homosexual males – a higher percentage than the year before. This though homosexual males are thought to comprise only about 2% of the general population. Intravenous drug users contributed an additional 17% of cases, with 5% in the overlap category of homosexual males who are also intravenous drug users. Only five children were diagnosed with or died from AIDS in 2005.

• Cancer struck about 137,000 Canadians last year. Breast cancer alone, at about 19,000 new cases, afflicted about 290 times more people than were diagnosed with AIDS.

• As AIDS goes from a death sentence to a manageable disease, reported AIDS deaths peaked at 1,501 in 1995 while last year there were only 59. Cancer, meanwhile, will kill about 66,000 Canadians of all ages this year.

• In 1986, a high Ugandan official said that within two years his nation will "be a desert." In 1988, ABC's Nightline declared that within 12 years "50 million Africans may have died of AIDS." Since 1985, Uganda's population has fully doubled. Nightline's predicted 50 million dead Africans by the year 2000 proved to be 20 million in 2005, according to the UN's estimate.

• In 1998, UNAIDS estimated that 12% of Rwandans age 15-49 were infected; now it says it's only 3%. Other agencies had estimated a horrific 30% of Rwandans were infected. According to James Chin, a former UN official who made some of the earliest global HIV estimates, such concocted figures are "pure advocacy."

• Meanwhile, worldwide AIDS spending averaged $1.7-billion between 2002-2004 but reached $8.3 billion for 2005 and is slated to hit $10-billion in 2007. UNAIDS insists that $10-billion isn't nearly enough.

Comme le dit si bien M. Fumento, la lutte contre le sida est devenue une véritable industrie. Et contrairement à ce que les activistes voudraient bien nous faire croire, que « nous sommes tous à risque de contracter le sida », “Fact is, almost everybody in Canada is safe from AIDS.”

Gilles Guénette