Specialist

It depends on who you talk to, whose statistics you believe, and how gullible you are with regard to those statistics. If you take the African numbers at face value, and you agree with their claim that the problem is AIDS, then, yes, it does so rank. If you look at the African statistics, you find two things. First, in the vast majority of the African AIDS cases, NO TEST FOR THE VIRUS WAS EVER DONE AND NO OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE EXISTS THAT THE DECEASED WAS HIV+, MUCH LESS HAD FULL-BLOWN AIDS. The diagnosis is based on a pattern of disease that looks a lot like malnutrition and other poverty-related conditions, that have been and continue to be pandemic in the African continent. Second, far more important: Africa has always had ugly life expectancy and death rate statistics. AIDS is a NEW disease. As far as can be told, it did not exist in the wild, in any measurable fraction of the population, prior to sometime in the 1970s or so. As a new, lethal disease, the introduction of AIDS to Africa should have made an obvious, visible change in the life expectancy and death rate statistics, since NOTHING ELSE WAS CHANGING and the old causes of death were STILL killing people, at the same rates. To oversimplify, with a contrived example: Suppose that Machine Gun Kelly is killing 100 FBI men per year. Baby Face Nelson moves into Kelly's turf, and starts killing 100 IRS men per year. Assuming an adequate supply of G-men, Uncle Sam should now be doing 200 funerals per year: 100 FBI and 100 IRS. If, however, Uncle Sam is only planting a total of 100 men per year, then someone needs to explain what has caused Machine Gun Kelly to hang up his guns. This, basically, is what the African statistics show. Despite the addition of a new, lethal disease to the mix, the African life expectancy and death rate statistics have not changed in a way consistent with expectation. It is not possible to find an uptick, or a before/after corner in the curves, that show that AIDS has become a significant player in the African Death Game. This calls the African AIDS statistics seriously into question. Once you question those, and you look instead at first-world data, you find that AIDS is a very small bit player indeed. Heart disease and cancer are MUCH, MUCH worse. So, for that matter, is influenza.