Entertaining but nonsense

I was intrigued by some of the figures casually scattered throughout an article I read recently in the local newspaper, an article which seemed lashed together with bailing wire, spittle, and a few token facts. In the article we were told that a man with HIV will, on average, infect a woman once in every five hundred unsafe sexual encounters. We were further advised that a woman with HIV will, on average, infect a man once in every one thousand sexual acts. Goodness only knows how such figures were arrived at and the author took no pains to enlighten us.

The article also included a photograph of a Ms Rachel Nissani who, we were informed, was an Israeli prostitute who may have "infected thousands of men with the HIV virus"

Let's just back the truck up here a little. Let's say that she has infected one thousand men in the course of her duties. Now if it takes one thousand sexual encounters to infect one man, how many will it take to infect a thousand men? The answer is one million!

If I might warm to my thesis a little more, let us assume that the accomodating Ms Nissani started her career at twenty years of age and is now fifty. A simple count reveals that she would have had to engage in approximately ninety one acts of sex per day (nearly four per hour), seven days a week for thirty years!

No wonder then to learn that "Ms Nissani" turns out to be an anagram of "sin in mass."