Disasters

Media squashes news of disease outbreak

Report the news – don’t treat Favored groups with kid gloves

Conservative groups say the truth about a new "multi-drug resistant microbe" prevalent among homosexual men is not being presented to the public because of political correctness. We present the alarming facts about this potential disaster below:

• Researchers recently announced they had isolated a new form of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, an infection that is spreading through San Francisco's homosexual community – and could spread to the general community.
• "These multi-drug resistant infections often affect gay men at body sites in which skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activities," said Binh Diep, the University of California-San Francisco scientist who led the team that made the finding.
• In fact, the researchers determined that this variant of MRSA infection is 13 to 14 times more prevalent in homosexual men than in the general population.
  But the media is obscuring that fact, according to Matt Barber, director of cultural policy for Concerned Women for America (CWA).
• "The real story here is the way that the media have whitewashed this outbreak," Barber told Cybercast News Service. "It is amazing to see what they've done with this."
• Barber said the initial reporting of the outbreak was "pretty solid" and news accounts related the facts "as is," but the coverage began to change after conservative groups like CWA noted that this variant is primarily spread by men having anal sex.
• "The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and other organizations began to jump up and down a bit and scream, and The New York Times and other organizations started to backpedal," Barber said.
• "The story was no longer the dangers associated with the outbreak – and the behaviors associated with it," said Barber. "The story now became about how groups like mine were supposedly misrepresenting the outbreak as some sort of 'new gay plague' or 'the new AIDS' – things we never said."
• Indeed, HRC accused CWA and others of being "anti-gay bigots" for recommending that one way to stop this outbreak of the infection is for homosexual men to curtail having anal sex – at least for a while.
• "Serious medical issues deserve serious consideration, not wildly off-the-mark press releases from anti-gay groups trying to capture media attention," HRC President Joe Solmonese said in a news release.
• "We saw this kind of hysteria in the early 1980s around HIV/AIDS, and I'll be damned if we will sit idly by in 2008 and let them perpetrate that type of anti-gay hysteria without calling them out on it," he said.
• Since the homosexual backlash, the University of California San Francisco has apologized for the fact that the study mentions homosexual men.
• "We regret that our recent news report (1-14-08) about an important population-based study on MRSA USA300 with public health implications contained some information that could be interpreted as misleading," the university's Web site said.
• "We deplore negative targeting of specific populations in association with MRSA infections or other public health concerns, and we will be working to ensure that accurate information about the research is disseminated to the health community and the general public," it added.
• Even the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has taken a somewhat politically correct line. In a statement issued recently on the new outbreak, the government agency said it is "not a sexually transmitted disease in the classic sense" – and that spread of the bacteria could be stopped by washing hands and covering open wounds.

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Reference Text

Homosexuals Squelch Facts About MRSA Outbreak, Conservatives Say
By Pete Winn
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer

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Our Take

We have to abandon the politics of political correctness when it comes to facts about a potentially disastrous disease outbreak, no matter what community they may originate in. That the development of this outbreak victimizes the gay community in San Francisco is no reason to protect that community in light of the higher priority of preventing a wide-scale epidemic. It's not the issue of what goes on there in San Francisco – which is another argument – but what's coming out of it: a virulent viral outbreak that could have disastrous consequences for the rest of the nation.