World AIDS day - Remember the boy who cried 'Wolf'?

I hate to queer the pitch on this one, but tragic as situation is - if you happen to live in Africa - there seems to be an atmosphere of out of proportion hysteria in the western world which is more of a danger than AIDS itself.

I can remember in the mid 1980s when scientists were trying to predict the spread of AIDS and their models were coming up with best and worst case scenarios. Even the worst case predictions showed that in the western world at least it wasn't going to be a problem. But even so the government decided to leaflet every house in the United Kingdom to warn of the dangers.

The outcome 25 years later: the spread of HIV has been EVEN LESS than the best case forecasts predicted. Pregnant women have been routinely screened for HIV for many years now and possible infections have been consistently below 0.04% i.e. 1 in 2,500 and very few previously unknown cases are dicovered by screening. The assumed rate of transmission between heterosexuals has been revised downwards from 1 in 800 to less than 1 in 1000. In other words, the random chance of catching HIV in the heterosexual population is less than 1 in 2.5 million. And of the 60,000 people who have HIV in the United Kingdom over half have come here already carrying the virus.

So why the hysteria? This is not Africa. Why create an atmosphere of fear which darkens many people's lives? Or is this just another case of the media blowing it all out of proportion while nobody dares to stand up and state the facts in case they get shot down in flames for telling the truth.