Okay, one sad fact about prison life is this: your cell-mate may be composed of 280 pounds of thickly muscled tattoed arms... while you are not!
Not to make light of this situation (it is horrid), but, detaching ourselves from the cultural sociological issues, on purely scientific grounds, one would hypothesize that HIV would get spread fairly efficiently via anal intercourse among the cell mates, right?
We've already extensively exhausted that fact that heterosexual transmission of HIV is virtually non-existent due to the Padian Paper.
So, if AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, and heterosexual transmission in virtually non-existent, than, by simple, logical induction, anal sex must be a prominent vector, right?
Well, the CDC just finished a 17-year study of HIV transmission in prisons.
So, stay with me: 17 years studying 45,000 inmates in Georgia. How many do you think contracted HIV due to anal sex?
88.
88 over 17 years: That's 5 per year. That's 45,000 inmates!!!!!!!
Padian found ZERO seroconversions among 176 discordant heterosexual couples over 6 years.
Prison study found 88 seroconversions among 45,000 people over 17 years. (Of course, only a fraction of the 45,000 were HIV+, so the ratio is far less. But, still the infectivity is low, low, low).
Here's Lousville professor Richard Tewksbury:
The popular assumption is that prison is a very good place to contract HIV infection. Both inmates and society as a whole have long held the belief that transmission is common among prison inmates. The interesting thing about this study is that it directly contradicts that. (This is from the Washington Post)
Money quote from the story:
The lengthy study, based on 17 years of research, used data from Georgia's prison system, the nation's fifth-largest with about 45,000 inmates.
The study said 90 percent of HIV-positive men in the prison system were infected before they arrived. Over the 17-year study, only 88 men became infected in prison by the virus chiefly through same-sex intercourse.
So, we ask, the Hank Barnes question: How can you have a STD, that ain't transmitted by sex?
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