A reader kindly passed along to me what seems to be the most recent, albeit geographically limited, data on the subject, from Texas Department of Health. The data seems to be 2003 data, based on then-living people in Texas with known HIV infections.
If you set aside IV drug users and hemophiliacs (I oversimplify slightly here) — groups that the FDA urges be excluded as donors, regardless of their sexual practices — and the unreported risk people, we have 7239 males that were apparently exposed through homosexual sex, and 920 through heterosexual sex. If we estimate that 4% of the male population is homosexual (the numbers that, to my knowledge, are most reliable), this means that the average male homosexual in Texas is nearly 200 times more likely to have HIV than the average male heterosexual; the rate for homosexuals is 7239/(.04*10,000,000) = 1.8%, while the rate for heterosexual is 920/(.96*10,000,000) = .0096%. (The male population of Texas is 10,000,000.) This is something of an oversimplification, and it’s based on a limited sample. Still, I suspect that this is a decent back of the envelope calculation; if it’s off by even a factor of 5, that’s still at least a 40-fold higher risk.
HIV is a tragedy; I hope it gets cured as quickly as possible. But it’s a mistake, I think, to deny that it’s a tragedy that afflicts male homosexuals at not just a higher rate than male heterosexuals, but at a vastly higher rate.
Incidentally, some people asked why the FDA doesn’t similarly exclude sperm donated by blacks, because they have a higher HIV infection rate. Analogies to race are sometimes helpful, but not always; but in any event, according to the Texas data, there were 5738 white males in Texas who had HIV, and 4820 African American males (I’m not sure whether they really mean African American in the sense of Americans of African descent, or whether they also include non-American blacks, but I suspect that for our purposes that doesn’t matter much). Texas is about 11.5% black and 71% white, so the rate of HIV infections for black males in Texas is roughly 5 times greater than the rate for white males.
This omits all sorts of important factors, including the categorization of Hispanics and also the need to focus, once IV users and homosexuals are eliminated from the donor pool, on the relative rate of infection by race of non-IV-using heterosexuals, which may be different than the overall race-based infection rate. But even if we focus on the first-cut approximation, we find that being black, while a risk factor for HIV, is apparently a 30 times weaker risk factor than being homosexual.
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