Petrelis Files

Stop AIDS Project Inflates S.F. AIDS Deaths


Jason Riggs
jriggs@stopaids.org.
Media Coordinator
Stop AIDS Project

Dear Mr. Riggs:

I wish to register a complaint against you and your organization for spreading grossly inaccurate statistics about the number of San Franciscans who die every year from AIDS.

Your multimedia HIV prevention campaign this Pride weekend in the Castro tells gay men that there allegedly are 300-plus annual AIDS-related deaths in the city. Thankfully, that is not the case, and hasn't been for some years. [1]

If you had taken the time to read the latest AIDS surveillance report from the Department of Public Health, you would know that for 2003, 216 deaths occurred, and in 2004 the city recorded 209 deaths due to AIDS. [2]

(Sure, those stats are still to high and I won't be happy until there are zero AIDS deaths, it does HIV prevention and the overall health of the gay community to have lies about the stats promoted by a community based group.)

So you essentially killed 175 people with AIDS for those years to make a fearful point. Such manipulation and lies about AIDS stats comes at a time when AIDS deaths continue to fall, a fact your organization willfully omits from your messages and programs. Can't tell the fags the truth about declining deaths because that would kill the alarm we're trying to raise, and jeopardize our funding, seems to me to be the agenda of Stop AIDS.

I find it ironic you've made such an egregious mistake about the city's dropping number of deaths related to AIDS, and you're quoted in this week's Bay Area Reporter making this wildly wrong claim: "The point [of Stop AIDS latest prevention campaign] is to have fun, but to also offer up some hard hitting truths using up-to-date data of the epidemic in San Francisco."

Hard hitting truths using up-to-data epidemiology! Sure, and there were WMDs in Iraq as claimed by President Bush.

Frankly, I think you owe the entire gay community an apology over your ignorance about the real stats for AIDS deaths in the city.

I'm also appalled $10,000 in city funds were spent on the Stop AIDS Project's campaign for this weekend, when it's clear no one from the city performed proper oversight to your scary and false stats.

A copy of this letter will be sent to the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors and the DPH's AIDS Office and will serve as a formal complaint against your group's use of city dollars to misinform the gay community.

Finally, I ask that you, as the media coordinator for the Stop AIDS Project, immediately issue a correction and apology about the false claim of 300-plus annual AIDS deaths in the city. It is not okay that our two gay newspapers, the B.A.R. and the Bay Times, both reported this inaccurate AIDS stats because of your group, so I hope you will demand the publications run corrections.

Regards,
Michael Petrelis

Sources:

1. Stop AIDS Project campaign

2. S.F. AIDS death stats , page 7, table 9, column number 3.