AIDS
So there's a lot of AIDS-related stuff in the media right now, since it's the 25th anniversary of the disease. But what exactly does this mean? Well, here, in an excerpt from And the Band Played On... is a description of exactly what this anniversary is of:
On Friday, June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published what would be the first report on the epidemic, based on the Los Angeles cases of Pneumocystis that Drs. Michael Gottlieb and Joel Weisman had seen in the previous months. In the week before publications, skittish CDC staffers debated how to handle the gay aspect of the report. Some of the workers in the venereal disease division had long experience working with the gay community and worried about offending the sensitivities of a group with whom they would clearly be working closely in the coming months. Just as significantly, they also knew that gays were not the most beloved minority in or out of the medical world, and they feared that tagging the outbreak too prominently as a gay epidemic might fuel prejudice. As it was, the fact that the hepatitis vaccine project had been largely a homosexual effort was downplayed for both Congress and the administration for fear that it would squash the program.
The report, therefore, appeared not on page one of the MMWR but in a more inconspicuous slot on page two. Any reference to homosexuality was dropped from the title, and the headline simply read: Pneumocystis pneumonia--Los Angeles.
Don't offend the gays and don't inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.
So for all the media talks about AIDS and how it's 25 years old, they seem to rarely point out that, hey, people were dying in Africa long before we'd ever heard of the disease. They don't mention how this important article was pushed from the front page and ignored. They don't talk about how the disease wasn't even named officially until more than a year later. I mean, I'm glad to see the disease in the media, but this whole anniversary idea seems a bit off to me. Because that article, unfortunately, wasn't that big of a deal. And anyway, how do you pinpoint the start of an infectious disease? Is it the first time it's passed from one human to another? The day of infection or diagnosis? And how will we ever know these things anyway. The June 5th date seems so arbitrary. There were many important events before that.
On Friday, June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published what would be the first report on the epidemic, based on the Los Angeles cases of Pneumocystis that Drs. Michael Gottlieb and Joel Weisman had seen in the previous months. In the week before publications, skittish CDC staffers debated how to handle the gay aspect of the report. Some of the workers in the venereal disease division had long experience working with the gay community and worried about offending the sensitivities of a group with whom they would clearly be working closely in the coming months. Just as significantly, they also knew that gays were not the most beloved minority in or out of the medical world, and they feared that tagging the outbreak too prominently as a gay epidemic might fuel prejudice. As it was, the fact that the hepatitis vaccine project had been largely a homosexual effort was downplayed for both Congress and the administration for fear that it would squash the program.
The report, therefore, appeared not on page one of the MMWR but in a more inconspicuous slot on page two. Any reference to homosexuality was dropped from the title, and the headline simply read: Pneumocystis pneumonia--Los Angeles.
Don't offend the gays and don't inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.
So for all the media talks about AIDS and how it's 25 years old, they seem to rarely point out that, hey, people were dying in Africa long before we'd ever heard of the disease. They don't mention how this important article was pushed from the front page and ignored. They don't talk about how the disease wasn't even named officially until more than a year later. I mean, I'm glad to see the disease in the media, but this whole anniversary idea seems a bit off to me. Because that article, unfortunately, wasn't that big of a deal. And anyway, how do you pinpoint the start of an infectious disease? Is it the first time it's passed from one human to another? The day of infection or diagnosis? And how will we ever know these things anyway. The June 5th date seems so arbitrary. There were many important events before that.