The AIDS EPIDEMIC IS JUST BEGINNing
Rob WadE
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
Fourteen years and more than 300,000 deaths ago, Peter Collier and I
wrote a story for California magazine about the AIDS epidemic in San
Francisco. At the time the virus had not yet been isolated and there
had been only 3,000 fatalities nationally. But it was already clear to
the medical community that the culprit was a retrovirus, that there
might never be a cure, that AIDS cases among gays were doubling every
six months and that if the behavioral patterns of gays and drug users
did not change, there would be more than 300,000 people dead by 1997.
In normal circumstances, the minimal public health response to an
impending epidemic would have been to identify the carriers of the
disease by mandatory testing of at-risk communities, closing off "hot
zones" of the epidemic, such as gay bathhouses and drug "shooting
galleries," contact-tracing of those who had been in touch with the
already sick and honest public education about the dangers of
promiscuous anal sex among gays and needle-sharing among drug addicts.
None of these measures, Collier and I found, was acceptable to a
powerful lobby of gay activists that labeled them as "discriminatory"
and "homophobic" and made clear to any public health official who
advocated them that they would be doing so at the risk of their
careers. As a result, none of the standard public health measures were
consistently deployed. Instead, a series of politically correct ideas
and "community-approved" policies became the only measures feasible
for political leaders to advocate, for the media to promote and for
public health agencies to pursue.
They included a number of emotionally comfortable but medically
misleading myths: that AIDS is an "equal opportunity" virus as
threatening to heterosexuals as homosexuals; that government tightwads
and homophobes who weren't throwing enough money at medical research
were helping to spread the plague; that "safe sex" with condoms and
government-promoted "needle-exchanges" were adequate preventive
measures.
Such myths were endlessly regurgitated by an irresponsible press that
reported (falsely) on "explosions" of the virus in the heterosexual
community and among teenagers and women. These reports were based on
statistics deceptively interpreted by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention in Atlanta, whose public health mission had been
subverted early on by the AIDS lobbyists. It is true, for example,
that from time to time the percentage of heterosexuals and/or women
contracting the virus has increased. But this is because the gay
population has been so saturated with the disease that the percentage
of new cases among gays relative to the total of new cases has
declined. Moreover, the heterosexuals who are infected are mostly the
wives and girlfriends (mostly black, Hispanic and poor) of drug users.
A new book written by gay journalist and activist Gabriel Rotello,
"Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men" (Dutton), confirms
the grim epidemiological knowledge learned over the past two decades.
As Rotello's reporting makes clear, the authorized approach to AIDS
was misguided to the point that it added to the problem. There is no
heterosexual AIDS epidemic, nor is there any likelihood of one
developing. And the "safe sex" campaign among gays has not only failed
to stem the tide of infection, but has encouraged a complacency that
is resulting in a "second wave" of the epidemic among the younger gay
population a generation fully aware of the epidemic's threat to its
health and survival.
An equally disturbing conclusion from the data accumulated by Rotello
is that the epidemic will not be ended by new "drug cocktails" and
other anti-viral medical fixes. This is not only because of the nature
of the AIDS retrovirus, which has a greater power to mutate than any
previously known microbe, but because of the historical failure of
drugs to wipe out sexually transmitted diseases. The discovery of
penicillin was once thought to herald the eradication of syphilis. But
because it created a false sense of invulnerability, and its repeated
use led to the emergence of drug-resistant strains, there are more
deaths worldwide from syphilis than when no medical remedy existed.
While some drugs, or combination of them, appear to have had some
success in slowing down the virus in some American victims of the
disease, there is little prospect of a medical cure in the near
future. At the same time, more powerful strains of the HIV virus have
already been identified in Thailand, raising the specter of an even
more virulent phase of the epidemic to come.
In these circumstances, the only way to arrest the AIDS epidemic is
the remedy that has traditionally been thwarted by "leaders" of the
gay community: Change the behaviors that feed it, in particular
promiscuous sex. Epidemiological studies show the existence of "core
groups" of aggressively promiscuous gays has been the key to the
epidemic's progress in the United States. But these core groups and
their institutional support system public bathhouses and sex clubs
have been defended from the start of the epidemic by gay activists and
their political allies as a "civil right," and moves against them as
an assault on gay "liberation." As one gay activist, quoted by
Rotello, wrote: "Gay liberation means sexual freedom. And sexual
freedom means more sex, better sex, sex in the bushes, in the toilets,
in the baths, sex without love, sex without harassment, sex at home
and sex in the streets." It also means death.
To help stop the AIDS epidemic, all gay bathhouses should be closed
immediately; so should gay sex clubs, with names like "Blow Buddies."
Public health officials also need to institute mandatory testing and
contact-tracing targeted at communities at greatest risk and they need
to issue clear warnings about the dangers of promiscuous anal sex.
Those officials who fail to carry out these duties are guilty of
criminal neglect, and should be sued.
Besq
AIDS. Innocent, trusting, normal people who don't indulge in risky sex, do
drugs or take blood transfusions are now at risk and the fed has let us all
down. Forget AIDS.
Rob WadE <rob_c...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:83f6d34a.03122...@posting.google.com...
Thom
wrote:
>I think the "mad cow" issue is just a bit more important right now than
>AIDS. Innocent, trusting, normal people who don't indulge in risky sex, do
>drugs or take blood transfusions are now at risk and the fed has let us all
>down. Forget AIDS.
Plus AIDS is nothing compared to Hep-B
THOM
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