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The Health Threat to Homosexuals
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22372 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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7 / 2002 |
425 Words |
| Author
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Peter LaBarbera
Peter LaBarbera is senior policy analyst with the Culture and
Family Institute (www.cultureandfamily.org), an affiliate of
Concerned Women for America, and the founder of Americans for
Truth. He can be reached at plabarbera"I would like to see
mandatory homophobia-prevention education integrated into
[all] elementary and secondary school curricula," one gay
activist said. |
While tolerance of homosexuality is increasingly taught in America's schools, very little is said about the extreme health risks associated with it. Life expectancy of homosexuals has been found to be approximately 41 years, according to a 1994 study of obituaries in gay publications.
A 1997 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology reported that the life span of a 20-year-old homosexual or bisexual man in a Canadian metropolitan area is 8 to 20 years less than the average male. The study's authors wrote: "If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged twenty years will not reach their sixty-fifth birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871."
In 1998, another study, this one in the journal Psychological Reports, used four contemporary databases to conclude that homosexual activity may diminish life expectancy by 20 to 30 years. By comparison, the National Cancer Institute says that cigarette use lops 7 to 10 years from the average smoker's life.
Even before the devastating AIDS epidemic broke on the homosexual scene in the early 1980s, gays' life spans were severely truncated by comparison with the national average. In 1977, the largest survey of homosexuals up to that time reported only 0.2 percent of lesbians and 0.8 percent of gay males were age 65 or older. Also, as long ago as the 1930s and '40s, sex researcher and sex-liberation pioneer Alfred Kinsey reported that less than 1 percent of the homosexuals he studied were over age 65.
The reasons for the vastly reduced life expectancy are the large number of life-threatening and debilitating diseases prevalent in the homosexual community and the high rates of transmission through dangerous sexual practices common among gays.
Today, for example, homosexuals account for roughly half of all syphilis cases in America. They are 5,000 times more likely than heterosexuals to contract AIDS and are 8 times more susceptible to deadly, liver-destroying hepatitis viruses. Ninety percent of gay men have chronic or recurrent viral infections with herpes, cytomegalovirus, or hepatitis B. Also, around half of homosexuals have been found to be afflicted by a group of otherwise rare bowel diseases, collectively known as gay bowel syndrome, that include amebiasis and
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