World AIDS Day
Never forget those who have been lost to this terrible disease, nor those living every day with it.  From the HRC website:
World AIDS Day is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV and AIDS. First held on December 1, 1988, World AIDS Day is about increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.
According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, there are now 33.2 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During the last year, some 2.5 million people became newly infected with the virus. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 years old and are killed by AIDS before they reach age 35.
But are we doing enough to combat HIV/AIDS in the United States?Â
Yet the disaster of AIDS in black or white America does not have to be this way. While a cure is still years away, a nation with U.S. literacy rates and levels of cultural and public-health sophistication is capable of greatly reducing its number of new infections. So why are new AIDS cases, particularly among blacks in urban areas, outpacing gains in control, treatment or education among high-risk groups?
The answer lies in the unwillingness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to adopt control measures, including routine mandatory testing among broad age groups. Any time blood samples are taken from U.S. residents ages 13 to 64, such as in an emergency room, physicians should have the right to scan for HIV. For those who don’t regularly visit a doctor, blood tests could be scheduled, with the results recorded by states and the CDC. As The Post reported last week, a recent study in the Lancet concluded that such measures, accompanied by treatment for all those who are HIV positive, have the potential to end the AIDS epidemic in Africa within a decade. The effects are likely to be faster in this country.
Read the whole thing!
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
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Thank you for remembering and reminding all of us of the impact of AIDS. I lost 40 friends in the early years and continue to be amazed at the lack of attention AIDS prevention and treatment receives in the media and above all from the gay community.
I fear we are going to see a surge in HIV/AIDS in the very near future. The incidence of STD’s in the gay community in Houston is skyrocketing and the only reason can be the lack of protected sex.
I for one do not want to live thru another generation of losing a friend a week to this terrible virus.
Jeb
Comment by Jeb — December 1, 2008 @ 3:59 pm - December 1, 2008
I’m not gay, but I have lost two friends to AIDS/HIV. One spent many months just wasting away. An awful thing to see. The other developed lesions on the brain and went fairly quickly, but still awful. My prayers to anyone who has or is connected to one who suffers this awful disease.
Comment by windybon — December 1, 2008 @ 4:26 pm - December 1, 2008
I am curious, why does it matter “that you’re not gay”?
jeb
Comment by Jeb — December 1, 2008 @ 5:26 pm - December 1, 2008
Am I the only one who sees a problem with HRC’s “solutions” to the AIDS epidemic? Should someone else have a “right” to screen my blood for undesirable traits? And what it routine mandatory testing? In what sense can testing be mandatory? What are the consequences for not meeting this “mandate”? And what could they mean by “blood tests could be scheduled”? By whom? And are people irresponsible enough to sleep around without a condom really responsible enough to be taking regular blood tests?
There is no viable solution to this problem short of a cure - unless HRC really means to imply that the CDCP should start rounding people up and going house to house as Health Gestapo checking to see if you’re infected. The problem right now, at least in the United States, is that people just refuse to wear condoms because they’re ignorant, stupid, or lazy, and I have a hard time believing that “ignorant” is a real choice given that I knew about condoms at 10 years old.
As long as we don’t have a cure for AIDS, we will suffer the consequences of fools who refuse to wrap it before they tap it.
Comment by DoDoGuRu — December 1, 2008 @ 6:39 pm - December 1, 2008
This article brings back such awful memories for me. When AIDS first hit, I was a young man in NYC. In those dark early years, 1980-1983, I worked as a recreation counsuler for Gay Mens Health Crisis. I had 26 referrals every six months, and never, never, did any of those 26 survive the six months. I did this as long as I could bear it, but eventually had to stop to preserve my own sanity. The funerals were endless, but the the thing that troubled me the most was the abandonment. Families walking away from their own children out of fear.
At the same time I was not sure what the cause of this disease was and it played havoc on my mind.
Eventually, a job opportunity took me and my partner to California, and the sense of escape was enormous. Until we found that we couldn’t escape it, it was here as well.
To this day I continue to lose friends to this horror, and it just never seems to end..
Comment by John — December 1, 2008 @ 8:23 pm - December 1, 2008
Jeb, don’t attack her. Geeze.
I remember when I was in High School, my rhetoric teacher gave us an example of words having meaning. He wrote AIDS on the chalkboard and wanted one of us to come up and touch it. The whole class stiffened up and nobody, volunteered. This was the early 90’s and I remember trying to go through the logic in my head (I was a rational scientist), but my emotion took over.
There are quite a few things that need to be overcome. But at the same time we need to understand the fear and not hate people for being afraid. Even non-lethal viruses cause fear (have just gotten over a cold somebody brought into the workplace). There are no simple answers to this and calling people idiots for being scared is of no help, nor is it even realistic.
Most people are aware that HIV/AIDS affects the whole world and every race, gender and age now. Just like cancer, it has become personal. More and more people at least know somebody with HIV/AIDS. As this happens, people will naturally become more aware and angry towards the disease. I really don’t have the answers for how to change things, and am even still working on myself.
A side note though - did everyone read about the bone marrow transplant “curing” a man with HIV? In that same article, it was mentioned that there are people immune to the virus - their cells don’t allow the virus to penetrate it and reproduce. I found both things very interesting.
Comment by Timothy — December 1, 2008 @ 11:09 pm - December 1, 2008
I was going to comment similar to DoDoGuru. Oh well.
Although, back when I was doing my EMT internship at Houston’s (Humble) NEMC ER, I had the pleasure of a “dirty” needle stick after drawing a patient’s blood. The patient was discharged while I was filling out the paperwork. The nurses wondered if they could test his blood without his permission. They did, he was negative and I felt better.
I still remember the “old-timer” medics talking about the days of treating trauma patients without personal protection. Yeesh!
I suppose because global warmism is more fashionable (read: profitable).
Probably conditioned by the liberal response that if you haven’t experienced X, you can’t comment on it.
I don’t have any friends that died from HIV/AIDS. That I know of anyway. Doesn’t stop me from putting in my $.02.
Comment by ThatGayConservative — December 2, 2008 @ 3:10 am - December 2, 2008
I am NOT attacking.
I headed up (as a volunteer) the HIV/AIDS testing and education program at Planned Parenthood (Baton Rouge) back in the late 90’s. I have told too many men and WOMEN that they were infected.
This was back in the early 90’s when gay men had to take care of one another because there was NO other help and Planned Parenthood was the only place to get an anonymous HIV test.
My point is that it is NOT a gay disease……and starting a conversation about AIDS with “I AM NOT GAY BUT” reminds me of the prejudice and abuse we all suffered in the early years.
Sorry if those attending here are not old enough to remember losing families, friends, jobs, OUR LIVES!!
Obviously we have not moved past the point where you have to be gay to be infected. So TGC its not an attack but a flashback of a very painful time…..one that seems to be present today as yesterday.
I welcome anyone’s comments, memories or any other thoughts but I have more than a few cents invested in the terrible part of OUR history and present day.
Sorry to lecture……I miss my friends.
Jeb
Comment by Jeb — December 2, 2008 @ 9:24 am - December 2, 2008
CORRECTION: I WORKED WITH PPH IN THE EARLY 90′S
Comment by Jeb — December 2, 2008 @ 9:30 am - December 2, 2008
Jeb, just curious, why the big deal about anonomyous testing?
The local swingers club (no, I’m not a member) requires checkups every 6 months from all members -and- the results are kept on file so the management can confirm their members are all up to date.
Plus if I drew a Black Queen, I’d want to make sure any partners knew about it. Anything else is selfish and greedy.
Comment by The Livewire — December 2, 2008 @ 12:37 pm - December 2, 2008
While terrible, the discussion of “mandatory” testing still gives me shudders. I’m almost 50 now, and AIDS surfaced when I was in college. I can still remember the rather frank, serious discussion by otherwise-sane leadership figures of mandatory test, forcible treatments and “the camps”. I can remember the initial years when it was Gay Cancer, then the Gay Plague. When it was an automatic death sentence to be HIV-positive, with the promise of a gruesome and lonely death.
….And just as-now, the damned fools partied-on. And damned they were.
To this day, I deal with a number of sexual hangups and social foibles that are the result of coping mechanisms from those dark days when no-one really understood what was happening, or the medical mechanisms at work. It changed what it meant to be “gay” for a generation that younger generations just don’t, and don’t bother to, understand. What it meant to hold people at a distance for fear they would be the next ones gone. What an impact the lying and mistrust played when people would not or could not be honest about their status. To fear that the next person you met and had feelings for might be the person who kills you. To fear making gay friends ‘lest they be the next ones in your life to be gone. The guilt you felt on hearing this-on-or-that-one was in the hospital, and you couldn’t bring yourself to visit or even send a card. The shame you felt as you muttered to yourself, “…better him than me”.
….And the damned-fools partied on.
Comment by Ted B. (Charging Rhino) — December 2, 2008 @ 12:44 pm - December 2, 2008
Not making a “deal” of anonomyous testing.
When I was involved in education and testing it was unwise to do anything but an anonymous test. The prejudice was too intense at that time.
Insurance companies would drop coverage immediately and often HR managers see all medical billing go across their desk causing job loss or at the very least discrimination. Anyone see Philadelphia?
It has been my experience that individuals that get tested often get a sense of security that inhibits safe sex.
Ask any health care provider and they will attest to the vast increase in cases of STD’s.
I for one will NEVER have unprotected sex. I am in health care and one need only read the side effects of antiviral drugs to know that treating the virus can be very difficult and not a safe bet that it will keep the virus at bay.
The treatment is life altering and very difficult to manage. Drugs are better today but being HIV negative should be the goal not the “well whatever”.
I doubt that I will see a vaccine or cure in my lifetime.
Jeb
Comment by Jeb — December 2, 2008 @ 1:47 pm - December 2, 2008
Ok, thank you for the clarification Jeb.
And yeah, short of nanotech breakthroughs, the idea of a vaccine is a long time off. Like the cold (and to a lesser extent, the flu) the little bugger mutates too fast.
Comment by The Livewire — December 2, 2008 @ 2:56 pm - December 2, 2008
Actually, no.
Never did the Macarena either.
Comment by ThatGayConservative — December 3, 2008 @ 12:54 am - December 3, 2008
TGC….sassy this morning.
Comment by Jeb — December 3, 2008 @ 10:17 am - December 3, 2008
Boosh!
Comment by ThatGayConservative — December 4, 2008 @ 2:11 am - December 4, 2008