I couldn't find anything else on this subject. Such "bug chasers" are real, but have apparently been considered a sad extremist fringe. Dr. Bob Cabaj's name carries a lot of weight in the gay community, but the more I thought about it the more these numbers seem awfully high.

Andrew Sullivan comments:

THE "BUG-CHASERS": I read Drudge's synopsis of the Rolling Stone piece arguing that one quarter of all gay male HIV transmission is now deliberate. The piece is not online, but the precis reads like Stephen Glass. Is there an actual study showing this? Nope. Just one doc mouthing off. Is there any evidence supporting such an extraordinary claim? None that I can see. There's one lonely fact, though:



"Dr. Cabaj estimates that at least twenty-five percent of all newly infected gay men fall into [bug-chasing] category. With about 40,000 new infections in the United States per year, according to government reports, that would mean 10,000 each year are attributable to that more liberal definition of bug chasing."

But those alleged 40,000 are for all cases of HIV transmission, and as anyone knows, gays form a declining proportion of those cases - maybe a little more than half at this point. So the only actual fact in the extract is obviously wrong. This urban myth was peddled in the 1990s and couldn't get any traction. Is Rolling Stone that desperate for sales? I guess I'll wait to read the piece.



It's unclear whether the math mistake is on the part of Dr. Cabaj, or if it was made by the writer of the article about Cabaj. Guess I'll wait and see too.