A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts.Um, duh:
Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.When we were first discovering what AIDS was and how it was transmitted (for some reason I have a clear memory of reading about it in Time & Newsweek while at the beach one summer in the 80s), first there was the Everyone panic! It can be transmitted by mosquito! Homosexuals will be the death of us all! phase (I vividly recall hearing a speaker with that message at a conference I attended my freshman year of college). Then there was the calmer (no casual transmission) but PC (we're all at risk) phase we've been in ever after. There seemed to be a fear that if we dropped the polite fiction that everyone was at risk, no would care enough to fund research for treatments and a cure. Maybe the highly effective medicinal cocktails are a product of that little fib, I don't know. The question on the flip side is: is it more merciful to preserve a person's feelings or his actual life? Think of all the millions of dollars spent on AIDS education for people who aren't at risk, while those who really need it are overlooked:
One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had sex with men. He said: " We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men is not declining and in some places has increased.
"In the developing world, it has been neglected. We have only recently started looking for it and when we look, we find it. And when we examine HIV rates we find they are high.
"It is astonishing how badly we have done with men who have sex with men. It is something that is going to have to be discussed much more rigorously."
