Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Sweat and Tears!



Remember all the errors in the curricula of the Federal abstinence programs? I blogged about that quite recently. One of these errors was the argument that one can catch AIDS through sweat and tears. Anyway, the Liberal Oasis caught Bill Frist red-handed, or rather red-faced about this. Frist is not only the Senate Majority Leader but also a physician (though of the cat-torturing fame), so he should know better than what the following ABC interview demonstrates:
"STEPHANOPOULOS: Now you're a doctor. Do you believe that tears and sweat can transmit HIV?
FRIST: I don't know. I can tell you --
STEPHANOPOULOS: You don't know?
FRIST: I can tell you things like, like --
STEPHANOPOULOS: Wait. Let me stop you there. You don't know that, you believe that tears and sweat might be able to transmit AIDS?
FRIST: Yeah, no, I can tell you that HIV is not very transmissible as an element, like compared to smallpox, compared to the flu, it's not.
(snip)
STEPHANOPOULOS: ...Let me just clear this up though, do you or do you not believe that tears and sweat can transmit HIV?
FRIST: It would be very hard...for tears and sweat to -- I mean, you can get virus in tears and sweat. But in terms of the degree of infecting somebody, it would be very hard."


Don't you just hate it when someone is made to say embarrassing things like this? Heh.