AIDS

[vakkotaur]

Today is World AIDS Day and you may make of that what you will. I did know someone afflicted with AIDS. A few years ago, he died of it, or if you prefer, of the secondary infections that AIDS makes possible.

This person was Dr. Paul E. Gray, a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville. He was happily married, definitely heterosexual, and monogamous - it would have been difficult to keep things a secret in the small town of Platteville, WI had they been otherwise. He certainly was not using illicit drugs, either.

The common stereotypes about people with AIDS do not apply. So what happened? How did Dr. Gray get the disease? His physicians gave it to him. Inadvertently and unknowingly, but that's about as good a description as any.

See, Dr. Gray did take some medication, prescribed to keep him alive, and it worked. But what Dr. Gray suffered from was a blood disease, hemophilia. He needed blood products to counter the hemophilia and before there was any test at all for HIV there was still HIV in the blood supply.

When I hear "AIDS victim" or "AIDS patient" I don't think of the stereotypes flung about thoughtlessly. I think of Dr. Gray, whose medication was contaminated by a virus nobody knew about at the time. And when I see, "AIDS is punishment from God!" well, I don't have a very high opinion of those who claim that, or their version of a god.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You are right, of course, and this has always been the case with HIV. We know now that the virus mutated slightly from one that infects African simians, and originally entered the human population through people who hunted and ate wild monkeys and apes on that continent.

Because it first came to attention in the US as an infection that was apparently being spread by homosexual contact, it quickly developed all the stigma that an intolerant society could attach to something of that nature. And of course, those who love to use quirks and accidents of nature to support their religious harangues will never let it go unless they find something even more juicy on which to stake their claim.

As it happens, I knew quite a few people whose names now appear on the Names Project quilt. It is simply impossible to view some of them as having received a "punishment from god" or from any other source. They were very unlucky, but did nothing to deserve what happened to them. The best thing we could possibly do in their memory is to put a stop to the inhumane attitudes of US society toward minorities of any kind. Because, without that narrow-minded intolerance, medical research in the treatment and prevention of HIV infections would surely have advanced much more quickly than it did, and some of them would not have died so needlessly.

[kiwihunter8.livejournal.com]

An old boss of mine, Barry died of AIDS; he got it through homosexual sex. Even back then ('92?) when he died I thought the 'AIDS is a punishment from God' was a big indicator of the quoter's lack of intelligence.

Does that mean that any misfortune, or any disease then, is a punishment from God? What, you spend a moment lusting and then the next week, you get a cold?

It's sad people still hold the gay view of AIDS patients. In Africa, it spread primarily, and still does, through heterosexual sex. This is slowly becoming the face of HIV in America too.