The plague years, redux, redoubled

What if a new infectious disease apparently spread from person to person, were to appear among us, manifested by pneumonia symptoms, among just a handful of people? What if through distance or disinclination to know more, large swaths of societies worldwide considered, those people to have nothing to do with them, and to have risks not confronting everyone else?

We know one answer to that. When it happened in 1981, at the dawn of Reagan’s morning in America, when prejudices could be once again embraced without embarrassment and science was sneered at, and when the pandemic first noted with reports of a rare pneumonia among five previously health and young gay men, it went without mention by that administration for five years.

Thankfully, humanity, a generation or two of which sprung up and survived since, learned series of lessons since that time. We have learned that infectious diseases don’t respect the imaginary divisions we put up between ourselves and others. We know our best hopes lie in science and solidarity. Don’t we?

And here we are again. Our president as this crisis dawns is clueless moronic solipsist who having earned his position through appeals to ignorance and bigotry has only those to fall back on now.

As the election of such a person shows solidarity remains an abstract ideal, beyond even the imaginations of the majority. Shelves emptied of toilet paper (a friend of a friend, in turn, says he is loading up on toilet plungers, so no one will be able to buy one), paper towels, eggs — eggs! it really was eggs today —  bandaids, bleach. Then the separate preoccupations that take over in a rudderless responses — shopping carts filled with gatorade, flowers — bunches at a time — cases of beer, cookies.

The virus, a tiny little microscopic thing, continues navigating its way, undistracted.

Counter productive, outdated and discriminatory

Celebrating National Blood Donor Month, an excellent Philadelphia Daily News column highlights the shame of the continuing ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men. In addition to the points the columnist makes — that the blood is needed, tested, and that other risks go unexamined, the ban sends the harmful and delusional message of “risk groups,” outside of which the virus is presumed not to be a threat.

If policy is to proactively prevent the spread of the virus that leads to AIDS, a more constructive move would be to ban abstinence only education, a proven risk.

Not a complicated matter

Two and a half years ago in Australia I was speaking to a young Zimbabwean man who said President Clinton was one of the greatest presidents in American history. As eight years of peace and prosperity leaves good memories, especially in the midst of what followed, his remark seemed founded in a level of common sense.

Then, however, he went on to tell me that the other “greatest president” in my country’s history was the current President Bush.

People like people who give them money, a friend explained to me later.

And so our 43rd president, reviled here, unlikely to be redeemed by history, will be remembered well elsewhere.

And although the importance of his one well-founded policy of his President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief should not eclipse the catastrophic effects of his other policies, it is right that Bush be remembered with credit for PEPFAR, in spite of, but with recognition of flaws that put ideology over evidence and thus weakened its effectiveness.

Overall, though, the infusion of money and concrete goals to fight AIDS in the nations hit hardest by the epidemic was the right thing to do, that was two decades overdue by the time it came about.

It can be credibly argued that Bush’s emphasis on faith and ideology made the $15 billion five year plan an easier sell than it would have been for his predecessors, and that is why no one did what should it before.

But it can also be argued that leaders with greater mandates, who were elected, not appointed to office as Bush was, should do the right thing sooner, better, when addressing humanitarian concerns.

Death denying?

Christine Maggiore is dead, and the tragedy of another life lost pointlessly would disappear into the mass of so many before hers but for the sad fact that for all that could be learned from her losses, likely nothing will be.

That is because those who know that HIV causes AIDS will go on knowing it, but those who believe it doesn’t, as she believed, will go on ignoring science and facts as sad as this and the death of her three-year-old daughter.

As the uncountable lives lost to AIDS before hers did, Christine Maggiore’s had much to offer, and for a while did, until she met the wrong person, who told her what she apparently needed to hear — that the problem that had upended her life did not exist.

With that new belief replacing scientific evidence in her mind, Maggiore went on to bear and breast feed two children, one of whom died of HIV-related pneumonia in 2005.

And as awful as it is to think of such a death for a child, that tragedy becomes a dot when the work of denialists is counted, in the deaths and and infections that will continue for decades to come because of South African President Thabo Mbecki’s denial that HIV could be treated, and prevented from becoming AIDS.

And those tragedies in turn join unnumbered others, happening now, still to happen when governments put faith over science, and talk over action.

Here Christine Maggiore’s death stands out, because she was one of a few prominent denialists. Around the world there are more.

But American denialism takes other forms — in federal funding for abstinence only education, in discriminatory laws such as those passed in California, Florida and Arizona this past election banning same sex marriage, and in “balancing” the views of such as Pastor Rick Warren — proven by research to be ineffective, with the urgency of stopping the AIDS epidemic.

Your Seat at the Table

To have a say in continuing and reforming global AIDS funding, check this out.

Another solution

Too long neglected, that should be in the new national plan, is federally funded

But does it work?

Here’s news about a cheaper, but not very thoroughly tested female condom . . .

CDC releases the latest

The shifting data on HIV transmission in the United States have been updated, and CDC officials say they show progress.

Lighting a Candle

The sun was setting beyond the fields and the lake into the Everglades as the sparse gathering came together at the community college cultural center last week.

In all about two dozen people came to commemorate the 27 years of loss, misery and hard work the AIDS epidemic brought to the far western edges of Palm Beach County.

The turnout wasn’t big enough to dot more than three rows of seats, but it wasn’t small enough to dampen the ceremony that organizers have built into their tradition over the last two decades.

Belle Glade Mayor Steve Wilson with the help of the luminous “Little Miss Destiny Stewart,” daughter of longtime organizer Sandra Daniels Stewart led the pledge, and speakers delivered welcomes in English, Spanish and Haitian Kreyol.

The elder Stewart has been with ACOTGI – the AIDS Coalition Of The Glades, Inc., since the start, when nurses, church members, and others in the mid ‘80s started joining forces against the epidemic that was sweeping the nation, and yet somehow said to be singling out their town for shame and loss.

Together, they have always come through when money was needed to help a local patient make rent, or food to take with medicine.

“Our theme this year is your life is worth saving, and it truly is,” Sandra Chamblee, longtime Glades resident, grandmother, hospital board member, volunteer, and since 1998, when she took her first paying work, director of the Glades Heallth Initiative, said in the English verson.

This is a close knit town, and when at the end, Stewart named some of the members of their little army that were gone, only the children didn’t remember the famous Dr. Deanna James, who worked at the Health Department clinic, and who told a congressional committee that if things didn’t change, black people would soon become extinct in the Glades.

“She passed away just before you were born,” a woman told her daughter. “Your father went to her service.”

A medical technician, she had worked with Dr. James six months before the doctor transferred to West Palm. “You know how some doctors clock in and clock out, and go back to where they came from and forget about you? She wasn’t like that.”

Someone had donated red plastic cups with holes in the bottom to hold candles for the walk from the campus to the city’s downtown, and Stewart asked everyone to remember to give them back at the end.

The sheriff’s office was charging $250 this year for the cars and deputies to escort the walkers along the mile and a half in the dark along one of the town’s two highways, so the organizers had wheedled the money out of friends and supporters at the last minute. They said they understood the sheriff’s office was hit with hard times just like everyone else in this year that had seen the $700 billion bankers bailout.

World AIDS Day 2008 is Time to Own the Epidemic

First it was urban gay men meeting in living rooms, joining forces to fight the epidemic that would be called AIDS. Then nurses and church-goers giving comfort to the dying in rural Belle Glade, doctors and scientists taking their expertise to forgotten nations around the world, donor nations and philanthropists’ foundations and sending food, medicine and a plan to try to make up for lost time, and still it is not enough.

From medical journals and international global health conferences to a lunch today in a Belle Glade church, those who know the epidemic best come to the same conclusion: we are not winning this battle.

The efforts of some will never be enough until everyone who knows of the AIDS epidemic recognizes it as ours, because the inequities that have fed the epidemic are ours as well. When that recognition comes, universal health care, comprehensive sex education, laws protecting decent affordable housing and the abolition of discriminatory laws — such as three just passed barring same sex marriages in Arizona, California and Florida — will follow.

So for those who want to know more, do more, change more, here is a start.