AIDS stats

The charts below from the United States Statistics Summary on AIDS (see: http://www.avert.org/statsum.htm) show how people living with AIDS most likely became infected. About 77% of the people living with AIDS are men.

Even the above stats, although clearly incriminating homosexual sex as the number one cause of AIDS, can be deceptive! They seem to show that normal vaginal sex between men and women is a major factor in the propagation of AIDS. This is not so.

Notice that there is no "pink" on the women's pie-chart. If "men who have sex with men" is the number one cause of transmission on the left chart, why does the category "women who have sex with women" not even appear on the right chart? Do lesbian women not kiss and exchange fluids in more ways than one? The truth is that the HIV virus is not as easily transmitted through fluids as other viruses, but it is transmitted mainly through blood exchange. A case in Australia, for example, showed that a woman could have regular vaginal sex for many years with a man "living with AIDS" without being infected. Thus the chart on the right indicates that HIV is rarely transmitted by the exchange of fluids alone.

What is then "heterosexual contact" (the blue colour in the above charts)?

Some people tend to equate heterosexual sex with vaginal sex. By doing this, AIDS becomes more "normal" as it could be contracted during normal intercourse. In reality, most of the "heterosexual contact" described in these charts is likely to be heterosexual rectal intercourse.
In the transmission of AIDS, the most important factor is not whom you have sex with, but how. Rectal intercourse is an act that may cause bleeding for one or both partners. Vaginal intercourse rarely does.

These statistics above show that sharing needles and homosexual sex are the cause of 88% of HIV infections for men.
However, sharing needles and rectal intercourse may be the causes for HIV infection in a much higher percentage of cases for both men and women !