Good points. Yeah, don't go down on random men in Swaziland...
I considered posing the statistic as you point out with the inclusion of the HIV prevalence rate. However, I wasn't clear enough on a couple of things:
Knowing the per-act risk with a random American is useful in figuring out how risky casual sex is with random partners. What's not clear is how much more likely people who have a lot of casual sex with random people are to have HIV. There's also the factor that hopefully once people know they have HIV, they'll be good enough to stop having casual sex with random people. Thus, the selection of people that you're having casual sex with has a huge impact. -- eg whether they're trustworthy, they get tested regularly etc.
I also wanted to figure out how quickly HIV would spread in a network of people who are all having fairly regular sex of different kinds with one another. This has implications on who you need to ask for regular STD results from.
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Date: 2008-05-22 05:35 pm (UTC)I considered posing the statistic as you point out with the inclusion of the HIV prevalence rate. However, I wasn't clear enough on a couple of things:
Knowing the per-act risk with a random American is useful in figuring out how risky casual sex is with random partners. What's not clear is how much more likely people who have a lot of casual sex with random people are to have HIV. There's also the factor that hopefully once people know they have HIV, they'll be good enough to stop having casual sex with random people. Thus, the selection of people that you're having casual sex with has a huge impact. -- eg whether they're trustworthy, they get tested regularly etc.
I also wanted to figure out how quickly HIV would spread in a network of people who are all having fairly regular sex of different kinds with one another. This has implications on who you need to ask for regular STD results from.