On World AIDS Day, Let’s Remember the True Forgotten Victims
2nd December 2010
AIDS forgotten? Sure, like Sarah Palin is forgotten.
Koop’s 1988 “Understanding AIDS” report, mailed to every household in the nation, was aimed at democratizing a disease with specific risk groups caused by extremely specific risk factors. A heterosexual couple appears in the first picture, with the first captioned image that of what appears to be a lesbian saying AIDS is also a woman’s disease. Lesbian-to-lesbian sexual contact as a risk factor? “To date there are no confirmed cases,” declared a 2008 CDC report 18 years later.
Today American black males have 30 times the HIV infection rate of white females.
Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the nation’s sixth and 14th-leading causes of death of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.
And no, it’s not homophobic to point out that AIDS is essentially 100% preventable while none of these other diseases is preventable at all.
Heterosexual men have a greater chance of getting breast cancer than AIDS. So I care about AIDS the same way I care about skate-board-induced quadriplegia: Dude, it’s your Own Damed Fault.
And guess who it’s being hinted should pay for prescriptions for the nation’s entire population that engages in high-risk activities? Yes, give and give generously. Uncle Sam insists.
Why such grotesquely favorable treatment for AIDS? Partly it’s simple inertia. But much is because a huge AIDS bureaucracy now exists, with vast numbers of organizations and their employees voraciously feeding at various international, national, state and privately funded troughs.