Camp Latrine Spreads HIV 03/09/07

Looming apologia from Les Simpson? Don’t be stupid.

Here is another one that got by the Amarillo Globe-News’ stable of expert fact checkers and even past Les Simpson who reads and vets every column before allowing it to see the light of day before his reading public.

In Mr. Van Camp’s screed on “We can choose to live without sexually transmitted diseases” he favors Darwinian evolution so he may reinterpret “survival of the fittest” to enfold the millions dying of AIDS in Africa. His message is that the entire African continent of darkies are unfit and catch HIV because, unlike us in America, they are immoral and promiscuous. One gets the feeling Mr. Van Camp would feel right at home directing a eugenics program.

His most outlandish claim?

The newest scourge sweeping the world, HIV/AIDS, is believed to have originated in African chimpanzees being used to develop a Hepatitis B vaccine.

This is completely bogus, an urban legend amongst the right-wing conspiracy crowd. HIV originated in chimpanzees and was transmitted to humans through “bush meat.” The virus can be traced back to the 1930’s long before any vaccine research it is supposedly connected to. Cheeta is really beating the bushes mad about this lie.

Van Camp then rambles on to the current brouhaha over Governor Perry, Gardasil and protecting women from the papillomavirus. The main nonsense he extracts from this is:

What does it say about our society that 11- and 12-year-old girls might need protection against a virus which can infect them only if they are sexually active?

What does it say about Mr. Van Camp and his ilk making bogus assertions and misleading statements, all to deny protection to adult women from cervical cancer?

AIDS and other STDs are what a doctor friend of mine calls "lifestyle diseases."

Let us remember that good Dr. Frist thinks AIDS can be transmitted through tears and sweat. Is that a lifestyle? For Mr. Van Camp people should simply be moral and wait until marriage. That will solve everything. Let us neglect the fact women still contract the disease even then.

Actually the only way to absolutely, positively guarantee the end of sexually transmitted diseases, even after marriage, is to not have sex at all, period. Let the religious right protect themselves with that for a generation or two. One wishes Virgil’s parents had done that.