Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short.

[c9]

Thomas Hobbes wrote that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In today's Globe & Mail, Doug Saunders writes about what happens when society's net snaps. Interesting to read.

One complaint I had: he says that "the charitable activity that has all but ended the AIDS crisis in the United States." Not maliciously meant I'm sure, but still.

Doug Saunders writes, as an afterthought, of "the charitable activity that has all but ended the AIDS crisis in the United States." He's wrong.

New HIV infections are increasing among young men and women, straight and gay. Unprotected sex is increasing. People living with AIDS/HIV have to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for drugs to stay alive, but millions in the US have no helialth insurance whatsoever.

The AIDS crisis isn't over. It's just that the media and Doug Saunders stopped paying attention, apparently.

Cameron MacLeod

Comments

[miket61.livejournal.com]

I think the AIDS crisis has ended in the United States - although, as you say, it's because no one wants to consider it a crisis any more.

The vast improvements in the quality of life of PWAs has taken a lot of the scare factor away. Someone getting diagnosed doesn't mean six months of wasting away followed by painful death - Atlanta is full of people who look like bodybuilders who have been positive for ten to fifteen years.

Infection rates dropped, and people got complacent. Unfortunately, I've seen enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that there are a lot of gay men who DELIBERATELY get HIV because they think that it's a one-way ticket to a monthly disability check and free drugs from Medicaid.

People fought for twenty years to banish the stereotype that AIDS is a gay man's problem and people who get it deserved it. Now we're in a middle phase where people still think that it's sufficiently preventable that people who get it deserve it. In addition to working toward cures and vaccines, we need to work to educate people. We have a national Stop Smoking Day, we need to have a national Get Tested for HIV and Resolve to Live a Healthy Non-Risky-Behavior Lifestyle Going Forward Day.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

That will look awful on a t-shirt.