Reply #20: You've made a few serious statistical errors. Your numbers corrected correspond with the CDC

[HamdenRice]

While your statistical inference is interesting, it's still an inference, which is inferior to actually measuring infection rates of real people.

Also there's one huge error you make right off the bat -- you multiplied the probable percentage of males who are gay against the entire male population. But the ban is on men who have had sex with men -- which means sexually active men, which means men who are at least teenagers. Our country does not have an even demographic distribution across age, so you have to multiply the assumed percentage of gay men against the number of males that leaves out all males under say age 15, as well as all gay men who don't actually have sex with men. (Keep in mind the policy screens out MSMs, not men who are gay.)

The other big statistical error you make is that you are looking at HIV and AIDS cases, when the relevant number you need is HIV infections. Somewhere around 50% of HIV positive MSM in several studies don't know they are infected and percentages in some studies are even higher. By definition, HIV and AIDS cases counts people who know they are infected. So you need to double or maybe triple your number. So your figure of roughly 1/2 million cases is equivalent of between 1 million and 1.5 million infections.

When you make these adjustments, the results are actually quite comprable to the CDC statistics of 1 out of 6 to 1 out of 4 MSM being infected with HIV. For example, taking your estimate of 8 million gay men (including children and the elderly and those who are not sexually active) and an infection rate twice the diagnosed cases, we would get an infection rate of 1 million out of 8 million. If we drop out children (about 12%) from the total number of males the estimate is very close to the CDC numbers -- about 1 in 7.

That said, again I have to emphasize that inferences from multiple demographic statistics are simply less reliable than measuring the infection rates of actual populations. These very high rates are not in dispute in the "real world" and have been steady and consistent for a very long time. Sadly, they are also rising. I find it completely puzzling that on DU lately, so many people seem to believe that well known and well established facts are themselves somehow political. They aren't.