There’s a good rundown at Media Matters about exactly how wrong Rush Limbaugh was the other day when he said:

And remember, back then in the ’80s, one of the accompanying — there — there — there — there was a lot of fear-mongering going on around — about AIDS, as a lot of people were scared about it. And one of the things that — that the — the AIDS activists said regularly back then was, oh, this is only a matter of time before it spreads to the heterosexual community. It’s only a matter of time.

And they used that as — as one of the weapons to try to get people like Reagan to start talking about it from their standpoint. And of course it — it hasn’t. It — it didn’t, and it hasn’t, other than in Africa, and in Africa it is — it is being spread not just by — it — it — it’s promiscuity that — that — that spreads this, if you want to know the truth. It’s promiscuity.

But it — it hasn’t made that jump to the heterosexual community.

Brock points out how there are 135,628 heterosexual AIDS cases (as of December 2002), and possibly many more–one quarter of the 850,000 to 950,000 people infected are unaware they have the disease, and a majority of the unknowns are probably heterosexuals who have not been checked out because they believe the kind of things that Limbaugh says. But just going by the 2002 numbers alone, that’s a lot–and when you add people who caught the disease by using dirty needles in drug use–another 240,268–that makes about 375,000 heterosexual people with the disease.

It is pretty safe to say that AIDS has made the jump to the heterosexual community, seeing as how heterosexual infections add up to the equivalent of three-quarters of the state population of Wyoming.