Straights men getting HIV - Queensland

Looks like us gays aren't the only at risk group of getting HIV. We should also include cashed up miners in Queensland.

HIV has, in Australia, until recent years been mostly limited to the gay community, likely thanks to the scare tactics from the 80's that totally freaked out straight people. For many straights, since then there's been hardly any more information about HIV precisely because it was viewed here as a gay disease. Um, I dunno how someone could be that stupid as to not know that HIV exists in the community, but anyway.......

Message to straights; HIV doesn't discriminate. Gay or straight, you can get it.

So here we have now the possibility that HIV will make a big jump from being mostly in the gay community to being in the community generally, like most other countries dealing with HIV infections. After all, overseas HIV is a human disease and not specifically a gay one.

First it was happening in Western Australian miners who went to Asia, had unprotected sex (HIV is rampant up there) and came home, having sex with their partners. Insane in these days of STI's. It's not only HIV, but gonorrhoea now has a strain resistant to drugs for example and it seems it's only a matter of time before it gets to Australia, let alone Asia.

But he says young cashed-up fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) workers holidaying in southeast Asia are making the notorious disease more common among heterosexuals.

"They go over with a group of mates, they have sex with half a dozen women or more, they may not be sober at the time when they're having sex. They can't recall wearing a condom," he told AAP. 

"They get back to the mine and their regular partners in Brisbane and they invariably have sex with them first and they then walk into the clinic anxious." 

Dr van Lieshout, who works at the Biala Community Health Centre, said that as recently as this month a FIFO worker had come to the clinic and returned a positive HIV test. 

Fortunately his girlfriend tested negative. more

I have mixed feelings about this. For so so long in Australia it's been the gays coping the blame for HIV. Now it's spreading to the straight community. I'm not holding my breath for a straight apology. How would these miners feel having the same hatred directed at them as has been directed at the gay community over this?