December 2, 2004
IF YOU PROMISE AN EPIDEMIC YOU BETTER DELIVER:
'Tragic Victory' in the Fight Against AIDS: Western medical advances could lead us to ignore the Third World epidemic. (Nick Schulz, November 30, 2004, LA Times)
There comes a point when there is enough critical distance from a tragedy for people to make jokes about it ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?"). It will ruffle feathers to say this, but in the United States we are reaching that point with AIDS.Consider the recent big- budget puppet movie "Team America: World Police." The film features a spoof on the musical "Rent" in which the film's protagonist, Gary, star of the Broadway smash "Lease," belts out a catchy show tune: "Everyone has AIDS! My grandma and my dog 'ol Blue / The pope has got it and so do you / C'mon, everybody, we got quilting to do."
Maybe it's funny and maybe it's not, but this satire of anti-AIDS activists and agitators wouldn't even have been possible just a few years ago. The devastating toll of AIDS in the U.S. was still too near to allow for such callousness.
But the song's humor draws huge guffaws from audiences today, in part because we've crossed a threshold here in the developed world: HIV infection — while still terrible — has been transformed from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable condition. Humor becomes possible as the tragedy of AIDS as it was experienced in the 1980s and early '90s retreats, slowly, from memory.
But it's not clear that this is such a good thing.
The distance has nothing to do with survival rates but was achieved when people realized that C. Everett Koop and company were lying to them about who's at risk. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2004 10:12 AM
As epidemics go, the 'AIDS crisis' has been little more than a case of the sniffles.
Posted by: Bart at December 2, 2004 11:32 AMOn Neil Cavuto yesterday, he was interviewing the CEO of Pfizer, who claimed more people in the U.S. die each year from internal bleeding caused by over use of Ibuprofen than from AIDS.
Posted by: jd watson at December 2, 2004 11:50 AMNow what would Andrew say about that?
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 2, 2004 1:57 PMC. Leverage Poop made me scared to make love to my wife.
Internal bleeding from overuse of Ibuprofen??? WHAT???!!!
Posted by: at December 2, 2004 3:48 PMThe distance also has to do with the fact that, despite all of the education about safe sex and risky behavior, the people in those at risk categories, gay men and iv drug users continue to practice risky behaviors as if nothing has happened.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at December 2, 2004 5:23 PMAIDS will become the next malaria: a forgotten problem in the US and a devastation in the Third World. Two centuries ago malaria routinely killed people in the US, all the way north to Philadelphia. But once we learned proper public health, developed effective anti-malarial medication (quinine) and very importantly, effective pesiticides (DDT), malaria became a non-issue in our country. The Third World sees millions of people a year dying from this disease, since public sanitation is non-existent, quinine and similar drugs are expensive, and DDT has been banned.
AIDS will be the same: medical advances and public health education mean that few people here will die, yet AIDS will wipe out the population of Africa (and perhaps large portions of other continents).
Posted by: Steve White at December 2, 2004 6:46 PM