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October 9, 2003

One person's treasure... ()

by fluffy at 4:43 AM
HIV hitting young at rate of one every 14 seconds:
The spread of Aids among adolescents may significantly slow the growth of the world's population, a United Nations report warned yesterday.

They make that sound like such a bad thing!

Not that I'm advocating HIV infections or anything. It's just, you know... the areas hardest-hit by HIV are also the areas which really could use less population growth to begin with.

And since when has the UN been wanting to increase world population growth, anyway?

Comments

#MT1322 Shawn October 9, 2003 10:10 AM

I'm all for slowing the population growth in poor countries, but I prefer giving those people condoms and birth control so they simply don't have kids. AIDS sounds like a pretty bad way to go since it opens you up to all sorts of other diseases.

I wonder what some of my former coworkers think about this stuff, since they were completely sure that straight people didn't get AIDS. If that were true, there would be no population boom over there to begin with.

#MT1323 regeya October 9, 2003 11:07 AM

When the fundies block the distribution of birth control, nature finds a nastier way of controlling population growth.

#MT1324 OcelotBob October 9, 2003 4:32 PM

I think the big issue here is the fact that were an entire generation of people nearing reproductive age to be wiped out, it can cause worse problems than slowing overpopulation. Take a look at Detroit, for instance. The city lost about half its population due to a number of factors, and the place is even now struggling. Now were this to happen to the typical sub-saharan african nation, then the results can be disasterous -- wars, etc, because the infrastructure has collapsed. Slowing population growth through knowledge, etc is a good thing, because people plan for it. A pandemic, on the other hand, is bad because it creates a situation where there's an unplanned drop in population.

#MT1325 fluffy October 9, 2003 7:19 PM

The whole issue I had with the article wasn't that they were saying that the spread of HIV is bad, but because they were specifically saying that the spread of HIV is bad because it lowers the rate of population growth.