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I am thirty-one years old. Mine is the first generation to have never known the world without AIDS.

I remember watching news reports as a kid about this mysterious illness that was afflicting a large number of gay men in pockets around the world. The news reports were almost always the same footage of one emaciated man in a hospital bed covered in lesions. His eyes were hollow, lips dry and cracked. He reminded me of a baby bird, with his brittle hair and uncontrollable head movements.

I’m sure his death came quickly after the footage was taken, and I’ve often wondered who that man was.

The news reports initially focused on the illness itself, the symptoms and fast progression into a rare form of cancer, Kaposi’s Sarcoma (the cause of the lesions) and the fact that doctors were baffled. Not long after the reports started, and the first cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) appeared, the disease had a name: Gay Related Immune Deficiency.*

That name only lasted for a very brief period of time, but it characterizes a pervasive attitude about the disease to this day, that AIDS is a gay man’s disease. Ronald Reagan famously refused to talk about AIDS during his presidency because of the association with gays. I believe he only mentioned it twice in any public forum. He apologized to the gay community (and the world at large) several years after leaving office for not doing enough, or making it enough of a priority.

Today, the statistics are overwhelming.

The one that I personally find most disturbing is this one: Young people (15-24 years old) account for half of all new HIV infections worldwide - around 6,000 become infected with HIV every day.

We live in the information age. I will post this message and it will almost instantly be accessible all over the world. I can just finish typing this sentence and some guy in Thailand will be able to open my page and read this. Yet, the message about preventing this disease is not being heard.

There is no cure for this disease. Yes, drugs have been made available that slow the progression, and in some cases have actually squashed the virus into an undetectable level of infection. However, the drugs are very expensive, and the hardest hit areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa where it is estimated that over 60% of the population is HIV positive, can not afford the medications. But the existence of the drugs in the US has actually caused a rise of infection rates because people aren’t as scared of the disease as they should be. They don’t realize that the new strains of the virus are stronger, more likely to be drug resistant, and are just as deadly.

Today, AIDS doesn’t make the news. It’s not talked about in private as often. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone wearing a red ribbon. (But those damn yellow LiveStrong bracelets are inexplicably still EVERYWHERE.)

I appreciate the efforts of WorldAIDSDay.org and their campaign to make sure that at least for one day in December we think about the pandemic that has claimed over 25 million lives in 25 years.

* Avert.org has an interesting chronicle of the early days of AIDS posted on their website.

 

Thank you for this. Other than superficially, I do not think I have been affected by AIDS. I don’t think. But loke you said, I could have friends who have it and I don’t know. Or they don’t know. But I, like you, have never lived in a world without it. It was “discovered” the year I was born.
To continue to think that this is exclusively a Gay issue is to continue to perpetuate a myth that could potentially kill off millions more people. The cost of a condom is so much cheaper than the cost of meds. Or a funeral. It’s very logical, really. Safe sex. Regular testing. Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. I just wish that people would get their heads out of their asses and realize that it is our responsibility to change the course of this disease. Not the politians, although they can help by passing laws that make it easier to get tested and making it so that shools are able to teach about safe sex AND abstenance (people are going to have sex. it’s what we do!). Not the drug companies, all they can do is mask symptoms. AIDS is totally preventable. Why hasn’t it stopped?

ginamonster wrote on December 4th, 2006 at 8:34 am

 

Say something already!