Stark Images and Complacency

A few weeks ago, I was preparing for an interview with the film crew of 1 Giant Leap for their new film, 2sides2everything. Not being sure at the time just what angle they wished to tackle about my life in the world of HIV/AIDS, I had made notes about the impact of the disease on our lives. I thought that perhaps they would want me to deliver a few statistics about the disease, so I found myself with my calculator one evening while watching the ever-more frightening news about the recent Indian Ocean tsunami.

In an online discussion about the tragedy in Asia and Africa, it became apparent to me that there was a sense of urgency that we developed about this disaster, and that the same sense of urgency is no longer there for the AIDS crisis. We have become complacent about the disease, but it continues unabated in many parts of the world. I decided to try to draw up a comparison of the disease to the natural disaster to give an idea of comparative scope. I am no statistician, by any stretch of the imagination, so these simple numerical comparisons and conversions are not meant to stand up to scientific rigor, only to make a point.

Just as we all now live in a world that includes the reality of the possibility of tsunamis, simply by virtue of living in the world today, we are all living with HIV/AIDS. We have a vivid image of the muddy, debris-filled waters rushing through Banda Aceh, but we have forgotten Rock Hudson’s plane sitting on the tarmac in Paris, or the stories of how Ryan White was forced from one school to another by fearful parents and school-room bullies. We saw the bodies in make-shift morgues speedily organized to handle this natural disaster. We have forgotten the purple lesions of our long departed victims of AIDS and the acres of quilt panels constructed in memory of those who died.

We saw the way in which the tsunami affected everyone in its path, without regard to race, gender, status in life, nationality or political leanings: if you were in the path of the water, it was likely to wash you away, unless you could find something solid to which to cling. As I write this, HIV is rushing into many parts of our societies with greater impact than a tsunami…..only its effects are not as visible. We need something to keep people from being swept away. We need some stark imagery to get us off our asses.

I haven’t heard a recent count of the number of deaths from the tsunami, but it was climbing steadily toward a quarter of a million people, so I will take that number, even if it is a bit off. Since 1981, the number of people who have died from AIDS is 29 million. There are additionally around 42 million of us living with HIV/AIDS throughout the world, many without hope of access to medication. If you assume that all of these people will have died from AIDS by the year 2025, then we can start to get a comparative scope.

First off, 71 million people, in this rough example (excluding the possibility of cure or feasibility of treatment for all people on earth), will have died in the 44 years between 1981 and 2025. That amounts to 1.614 million people each year or about 4,421 people per day for 44 years. If you take the death toll from the tsunami and divide it by the number of days in a year, it amounts to about 685 deaths/day for one year. In the course of a year, then, the AIDS crisis would be killing roughly 6.5 times as many people as the tsunami. Over the span of the 44 years of the disease, that amounts to a death toll 284 times as high as the number of people swept away in the tsunami.

If you consider that there are many, many cities in the world with populations of about 250,000 people, you could imagine that the equivalent of a medium-sized city was wiped away by the tsunamis. That number of deaths is roughly equivalent to the number of people killed in the Allied bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden combined. The number of deaths from AIDS, though, over that 44 year period, is going to exceed the current populations of many Western countries, and represents the loss of something approaching one fourth of the current US population!

For any of you who lost loved-ones in the tsunami, please know that I am very conscious of your loss and the importance of each and every life that I know to be so precious. I know that the waves wiped out whole families, whole villages, whole segments of society. I am deeply saddened by your loss. I am equally saddened by the loss of millions of people to AIDS.

Why are we complacent about AIDS in the west now? I think there are several reasons. One is that we have been told by the media that the new medications have taken care of the problem for us. Perhaps there was no intent to send out that message, but it was successfully sent. The rate of new infections in the gay male communities in the West is increasing again because of this issue of complacency. I have heard it said that "If I get infected, I will just take a pill, and everything will be ok." People have been told that the drugs are effective, but little has been said about the cost of treatment or of the terrible side-effects that can come along with therapy. AIDS clinicians borrowed a term from oncology and called the combinations of drugs used to treat AIDS a "cocktail". In a general society that sees the term cocktail as an alcoholic drink and not as a combination of chemotherapy agents, the widespread use of this term is a misleading travesty. They should refer to this treatment as ongoing, daily and unending chemotherapy, which is exactly what it is. It is far better to protect yourself than to endure the treatment. No amount of physical pleasure is worth the consequences.

Furthermore, our politicians, bolstered by the views that many victims of this disease deserve their gruesome deaths, are hesitant to do more to combat HIV/AIDS. It would be politically more expedient for them to funnel money into cancer or heart disease or some other, more acceptable disease. Don’t get me wrong, we need more money for the support of people suffering from all diseases. However, if we don’t soon see that HIV has the capacity to mutate and to spread exponentially throughout the population, we will have missed a fine point about how other diseases are less threatening on the whole. Similarly, I have seen some politicians take advantage of the term "innocent children" when supporting programs for AIDS orphans, but won’t touch a program that would prevent the parents from getting sick. There is an implied "sin" involved in contracting AIDS that makes adult victims less appealing to a vote-seeking politician. Perhaps that is why the US Presidential debates revealed that none of our candidates seemed to realize that the fastest growing demographic group of AIDS in the US is African-American women between the ages of 25 and 44.

In Africa, entire segments of societies are dropping out. Missing. Gone. There are countries that are expected to lose most of the middle-aged segment of their society, leaving only orphans and the elderly. Imagine a village where you can’t get bread because the baker is dead, or where you can’t get meat, because the butcher is dead, or where you can’t get an education because the teacher is dead. This disease is spreading throughout these societies without regard to any social status. It is a disease of all people, not a gay disease, or an African disease, or a black or white disease. If you are not taught how to protect yourself, how to use a condom, and how to avoid transmission, you are at risk.

George W. Bush stood before the US Congress and the world and told us he had greatly increased funding to African AIDS relief. To date, the majority of that funding has not been released because of insistence on a clause that only abstinence can be taught as a means of prevention! What good is that? It was, as far as I am concerned, an empty promise.

Equivalent funding in the US has not been made available to the most indigent people in our societies. In North Carolina, for example, you can only qualify for assistance if you live below 125% of poverty level, or making less than $12K/year!

So what kind of imagery does it take to get us off our asses? If a sixty-foot tall wall of water will generate the kind of love and outpouring of care that it did, what can we do to envision the four hundred foot tall wave that is coming at us from the sea of our indifference?

Categories: HIV/AIDS tsunami pandemic politics