The Failing Guardian
I'm not even going to bother contextualising this one. No preamble. Open up by clicking on this squalid piece that The Guardian, to its shocking discredit, chose to publish.
Giuseppe Caramazza, I'm sure, does valuable humanitarian work. However, he exhibits all the wilful blindness of a man defined by a pre-existing ideology. That's fine; it's his business, even if I don't expect to see it printed by a newspaper as fact. However, his claim:-
"It is sad to see that the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies (which thrive on a large number of patients) are always protected by western journalists who have no first-hand knowledge."
Is what makes this especially hateful, giving his opinions the status of informed truth, and roping in a Big Pharma conspiracy to help his words play to the gallery.
Caramazza claims that "perhaps" condoms are effective against HIV transmission (perhaps?. Fucking perhaps?), playing on the old myth that condom effectiveness is only 95%. It's a statistic that is simply not true, and it really shouldn't be doing the rounds any more.
That's not "opinion", it's been proven. Here's a study, if you want (there's plenty more). Short version; of 124 couples with one HIV-positive member, who consistently & correctly used condoms over a 20-month period, the number of uninfected partners who contracted the disease was... zero. Yeah, read that again if you want. The report estimates that at about 15,000 incidences of intercourse.
Zero.
Caramazza also talks about the low rate of HIV in Uganda, where there was "a two-decade campaign stressing the importance of abstinence and faithfulness". Well, here's a study of that period. Results? There was no increase in abstinence or monogamy, but there was a high incidence of condom use. So that's that one pretty much accounted for.
The point is this; those facts (yeah, not opinions, facts) took me ten minutes on Google to find. If people want to discuss something so important on the basis of "well a bloke in the pub said", that makes them fucking idiotic. If a newspaper wants to print a piece, as an alternative opinion about something nebulous and unquantifiable, then that's nothing short of shameful.
Giuseppe Caramazza, I'm sure, does valuable humanitarian work. However, he exhibits all the wilful blindness of a man defined by a pre-existing ideology. That's fine; it's his business, even if I don't expect to see it printed by a newspaper as fact. However, his claim:-
"It is sad to see that the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies (which thrive on a large number of patients) are always protected by western journalists who have no first-hand knowledge."
Is what makes this especially hateful, giving his opinions the status of informed truth, and roping in a Big Pharma conspiracy to help his words play to the gallery.
Caramazza claims that "perhaps" condoms are effective against HIV transmission (perhaps?. Fucking perhaps?), playing on the old myth that condom effectiveness is only 95%. It's a statistic that is simply not true, and it really shouldn't be doing the rounds any more.
That's not "opinion", it's been proven. Here's a study, if you want (there's plenty more). Short version; of 124 couples with one HIV-positive member, who consistently & correctly used condoms over a 20-month period, the number of uninfected partners who contracted the disease was... zero. Yeah, read that again if you want. The report estimates that at about 15,000 incidences of intercourse.
Zero.
Caramazza also talks about the low rate of HIV in Uganda, where there was "a two-decade campaign stressing the importance of abstinence and faithfulness". Well, here's a study of that period. Results? There was no increase in abstinence or monogamy, but there was a high incidence of condom use. So that's that one pretty much accounted for.
The point is this; those facts (yeah, not opinions, facts) took me ten minutes on Google to find. If people want to discuss something so important on the basis of "well a bloke in the pub said", that makes them fucking idiotic. If a newspaper wants to print a piece, as an alternative opinion about something nebulous and unquantifiable, then that's nothing short of shameful.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
20:51
1 Comments:
It's becoming very polarised in there, and that's before you even get into the faith debates. I regret to say I spend far too much of my time on yon webthing tip-toeing aroung the psychos trying to get a bit of news.
They've had Shimon Peres on there though, and Tony Blair and others, so if this boy wants to be the king of chutzpah he needs to up his game.
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