The Real Tragedy Of AIDS

[NATO AIR]

god bless bill clinton.. i mean what would the world's less fortunate do without billy bob to swoop in like a vulture, bleed their cause dry and hijack any remaining goodwill for a photo op.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/082305D.html

The Real Tragedy of AIDS

By James K. Glassman Published 08/19/2005

The press these days is obsessed with avian flu. "Officials are preparing as though the virus is the heir apparent to the 1918 international flu pandemic, which killed more than 40 million," says the Baltimore Sun.

Precautions are encouraging, but remember that the ability of scientists - not to mention the media - to predict the course of diseases is extremely limited.

In 1986, Newsweek forecast that by 1991, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, "will have spread to between 5 million and 10 million Americans." Never happened. Infections peaked at about 1.5 million, and, since 1995, the disease has been sharply on the decline.

I am not minimizing the horror of AIDS, but the disease has largely been checked in the United States and Europe by education on prevention, through high-quality professional care, and, after a multi-billion-dollar effort by American and European and drug companies plus basic research by academic institutions, with anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs, which stop HIV from developing into full-blown AIDS.

In the 24 years since it first appeared, AIDS has mutated from a middle-class disease mainly afflicting male homosexuals in the United States to a disease of poverty, mainly afflicting heterosexuals in Africa. Last year, 2.3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS compared with 20,000 in Europe and the U.S. combined.

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