"One in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS by 1990"

[Toro]

Global warming is happening. Mankind is almost certainly contributing to it, though by how much is uncertain.

But are the effects catastrophic?

Maybe, I don't know. Nobody does. But the probabilities are low.

I do know that people get themselves worked up into a frenzy, including very well respected members of the scientific community, as we saw with the AIDS scare 20 years ago, which is reminiscent of the apocalyptic forecasts for global warming.

The tide of doom reached its highwater mark between 1985 and 1987. It was as if scientists were in competition to launch the most titillating picture of impending disaster.

William Haseltine, Harvard AIDS scientist and collaborator with Robert Gallo, declared the epidemic to be

"major peril to our entire species. We haven't seen anything that we can't control except nuclear bombs, that's of this magnitude. We've got big problems".

Another Harvard scientist, Myron Essex, added the exhortation that

"we must act fast enough now so that we won't have 20-40 million Americans infected 5-10 years from now"

The action he indicated was unstinting funding of AIDS research. Dr Matilda Krim, Director of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, a recipient of AIDS research dollars, likened AIDS to the 1918 influenza epidemic:

"In ten years it could affect even a million people [in the US]. Worldwide, it can be 10 million, 100 million. God knows."

Jerome Groopman, MD, yet another Harvard scientist, told a Discover Magazine reporter in 1986:

"This is much, much worse than anything I would ever have envisioned. To think there are going to be a quarter of a million people in the US alone with the disease by [1990]."

(The actual 1991 figure was 46,986). Pulling out all the stops, Harvard celebrity Steven J. Gould told a New York Times reporter that AIDS might eventually reduce world population by 25%.

Why didn't credible health authorities calm the feeding frenzy? Because credible authorities instigated it. Consider this authoritative statement of the orthodoxy in Confronting AIDS (1986):

If the spread of the virus is not checked, the present epidemic could become a catastrophe. The Institute of Medicine-National Academy of Sciences Committee on a National Strategy for AIDS therefore proposes perhaps the most wide-ranging and intensive efforts ever made against an infectious disease . . . a massive, continuing campaign should begin immediately to increase awareness of the ways persons can protect themselves against infections.

The media loved it. Editors and television producers groomed their symbiotic relationship with experts. HIV mutated to the Media Transforming Virus. The more the media craved calamity, the more forthcoming scientists were. Big-name entertainers got into the act as well. Rock Hudson has been mentioned. Randy Shilts credits his celebrity with collaring free-floating anxiety and sympathy and directing it toward the disease. Benefit concerts and candlelight vigils were held. Comedians diverted audiences with AIDS jokes. Phil Donohue and Oprah Winfrey squeezed the story to the last tear. Oprah beguiled her viewers with a stupendous spectre:

"Research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That's by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me."

They loved it. Oprah knows entertainment.

America exported AIDs infotainment to Oz. Here is Glynns Bell in The Bulletin cover story of 17 March 1987.

He is a victim of the AIDS holocaust, a disease that is insidiously spreading through nearly every country in the world. Caused by a treacherous and slow-acting virus, it knows no national borders, no age or sex, no colour, creed or race. It has already infiltrated Australia and lies silently poised to strike at the heart and health of the country.

After pausing to note that this evocative image is discordant with the actual number of AIDS cases, Bell sugar-coated dull facts with an exciting fantasy:

"But the time bomb is ticking. Australia is counting down to the moment when AIDS stops being a localised firefight and, like herpes, become all-out warfare on the general population".

Our newspapers were an obliging conduit from the World Health Organisation's epidemic hyping. WHO created the monster figures on African AIDS by multiplying reported AIDS cases and infection by 100. Journalists were delighted at the prospect of catastrophe. Thus the Sunday Express, in 1986, reported excitedly:

"the deadly disease AIDS is now so out of control in black Africa that whole nations of people are doomed, leaving vast areas of now populated land devoid of a single living person within the next ten years".

The justification for balancing truth with effectiveness was what WHO AIDS director Jonathan Mann, MD, called the "hidden factor". The hidden factor is the AIDS cases not counted because they haven't been reported. African doctors didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this showmanship. After asking "Where are all the graves?" Dr. Konotey-Ahulu went on to pose a second question: "Why do the world's media appear to have conspired with some scientists to become so gratuitously extravagant with the untruth?"

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aids/chap5.htm

 

[jillian]

Except that it took Act Up and other activist groups to get funding for treatment of the gay plague, didn't it? So, what happened? AIDS is predominantly a chronic long term illness now because we learned, at least in this country. Now it's ravaging other countries and the predominant victims of it are women.

Here we weren't allowed to close our eyes... or it would have been catastrophic, no?

And, FWIW, to gay people in the 80's and early 90's it WAS catastrophic and the numbers of people dying was horrific. Even money, ultimately didn't buy a reprieve then, and Malcolm Forbes died of AIDS in 1990. His wealth couldn't protect him. It wasn't hysteria or overstatement.

Perhaps a little "hysteria" is good to finally get people problem solving? And I wouldn't diminish or disparage it. Many of us know people who died of AIDS or who have been very sick.

 

[Larkinn]

Global warming is happening. Mankind is almost certainly contributing to it, though by how much is uncertain.

But are the effects catastrophic?

Maybe, I don't know. Nobody does. But the probabilities are low.

I do know that people get themselves worked up into a frenzy, including very well respected members of the scientific community, as we saw with the AIDS scare 20 years ago, which is reminiscent of the apocalyptic forecasts for global warming.


http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aids/chap5.htm

Billions have been spent since then on preventing the spread of AIDS...where that money hasn't been spent, in places such as Africa, as many as 1/3 of the population has AIDS.

We got freaked out by AIDS and did something about it...even with the billions that have been spent we still have some 35 million around the globe who are HIV+.

 

[Diuretic]

"But the time bomb is ticking. Australia is counting down to the moment when AIDS stops being a localised firefight and, like herpes, become all-out warfare on the general population".

We (Aus) absolutely love to wind each other up by telling ourselves that, "if it's in the States [whatever it is], it'll be here inside ten years!" It's like kids around a campfire telling ghost stories.

Although on this one it was right. I remember being in San Francisco in 1984 and on the bus there were tear-off tickets with AIDS information on them. I took a couple, sort of a sardonic souvenir. But a year or so before our media, or some sections of it, carried stories about Karposi's Sarcoma and how it was being seen in individuals in the gay community in Sydney.

But we did things like clean needle exchanges and that has helped keep it minimised.