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Attacking HIV in Africa

Thank you for running a very important Commentary column by Michael Fumento ("African AIDS myths," Sunday) on irresponsible assumptions regarding heterosexual HIV transmission in Africa and the overlooking of poor injection hygiene as a factor.

Three forms of political correctness — left (HIV is everyone's disease), right (HIV is the price of sexual sin) and center (large well-intentioned public assistance is good for Africa) — have joined in an unwitting collaboration that has resulted in HIV, a blood-borne virus, rashly and mysteriously being regarded as simply just another (albeit deadlier) venereal disease. Such a conclusion has been made without serious scientific scrutiny of how heterosexual HIV transmission occurred and without any explanation or even serious examination of why this rashly assumed change in the nature of HIV's spread seems to work on only one continent.

And all that was done without a serious set of systematic studies first to specifically discount well-known major transmission routes (unsafe injections and specific types of sexual intercourse).

It is time to no longer take international health organization statements and exculpatory self-designed studies on this subject at face value. If serious study is to be done, both the dissenting scientists and the international institutions should collaborate on a study design to trace the authentic roots, prevalence and transmission of this terrible scourge.

MATTHEW HOGAN

Silver Spring

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