Hiv Aids Quotes

Some women do not masturbate for pleasure; they masturbate to make a political statement: to remind us that women do not really need men (or at least not as much and as frequently as every single male chauvinist and every single misogynist believes).

It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.

That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.

Shame is the demon that keeps many of us trapped in our pain; healing comes when we gain the courage to confront our demon(s).

Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.

A big fear of mine is that I will die before the gender professionals acknowledge that someone like me exists, and then I really won't exist to prove them wrong.

A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.

Opioids are now on pace to kill as many Americans in a decade as HIV/AIDS has since it began, with leveling-off projections tenuously predicted in a nebulous, far-off future: sometime after 2020.

We live in a completely interdependent world, which simply means we can not escape each other. How we respond to AIDS depends, in part, on whether we understand this interdependence. It is not someone else's problem. This is everybody's problem.

It really hasn't hit me that I am about to die. I see the grief around me, but inside I feel serene and a certain kind of peace. My whole life I've wanted to be a gay man and it's kind of an honor to die from the gay men's disease.

No one is spared from it

Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.

Most if not all sexually active people do not really love having sex; they merely love experiencing an orgasm every now and then.

Listen, I wanted to say, I don't need your judgment, okay? I have enough to deal with without you contributing, so can we just get on with this so I can get out of here? But I couldn't form the words. Dr. Johnson viewed me as a child, and somehow, under his contemptuous gaze, I had regressed to one. I was frightened and shy, and it was all I could do to answer his questions and count the seconds until the end of the visit.

May we each find in ourselves the courage we forgot we have, to see the beauty we forgot is inside us, while battling the demons we forgot we can slay, on a battlefield we forgot we can win.

I didn't want this man touching me in those places. It wasn't that he was being inappropriate, it was just more that he obviously didn't view me as a person, let alone a scared person with actual feelings. He just saw me as yet another scientific specimen there for his own experimenting. I squeezed my eyes shut, cringing the entire time.

Globally, millions of married men and women engage the services of sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns about the increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues to blossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives and the dissolution of several marriages.

Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes. Remus’s

One of the Big Ideas in this book is that fungi, especially fungi from old-growth forests, may be sources of new medicines that are active against a range of germs, including HIV/AIDS and the causative agents of smallpox and anthrax, potential bioterrorist threats.

A planet without AIDS is possible, but to create that planet we must do away with the vestiges of the old planet where testing positive to the HIV virus effectively relegates an individual to the subclass of Human society

Our society has made it extremely difficult for those living with the virus to declare their status

We’re all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.

Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.

The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.

One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn’t have a pandemic.

AIDS would have claimed fewer lives if we had publicly recommended what I wish to call ‘The Presumption of Sickness,’ i.e., the principle that whomever we are about to sleep with is HIV-positive until proven HIV-negative.

The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienation have compelled most victims to conceal their status while the malevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge to unsuspecting men and women

The Postman rings twice, but the Insurance man rings until he collects"-Scott G. Brown

HIV is free, why pay for it

it's not a death sentence anymore it's not death anymore it's more it's a sentence a sentence

some years later, that he had “faith,” then add, “I also have faith in penicillin, rifampin, isoniazid, and the good absorption of the fluoroquinolones, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true, too. So if I had to choose between lib theo, or any ology, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don’t have to make that choice, do I?

Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I've read a lot of books on the subject-when you don't need much sleep you have a lot of time to read-and I can tell you that if it weren't for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won't one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that's essential to our survival as a race. I'm a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I'm definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.

The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.

With regards to getting laid and getting AIDS: Being interesting can be an interesting guy’s downfall.

Unlike wealth, fame makes it easier for some men and more difficult for some to sleep around.

Is the drive to refuse gay blood a fear of contracting HIV/AIDS, or is it an embodiment of the irrational fear that receiving blood from gay people will somehow make them gay?

Crystal, do you like being a white girl?

Imagine for a moment that 10 million children were going to lose their lives next year due to the earth's overheating. A state of emergency would be declared and you would be reading about little else. Well, next year, more than 10 million children's lives will be lost unnecessarily to extreme poverty and you'll hear very little about it. Nearly half will be on the continent of Africa, where HIV/AIDS is killing teachers faster than you can train them and where you can witness entire villages in which chilren are the parents... Will American Christians stand by as an entire country dies? --Bono

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

The only real problem came with a track called ‘The Last Song’. Bernie’s lyrics were about a man dying of AIDS being reconciled with his estranged father, who had excommunicated him when he found out he was gay. They were beautiful, but I just couldn’t cope with singing them. It was just after Freddie’s death. Somewhere in Virginia, I knew Vance Buck was dying, too. Every time I tried to get the vocal down, I started crying. Eventually I managed it and ‘The Last Song’ was subsequently used as the finale of And the Band Played On, a docudrama about the discovery of, and the fight against, HIV.

Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved

It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn’t among them – at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around this, we may be in real trouble.

How many thousands of stories like yours have been told and forgotten how many stories of lovingly durable nurses of hospital sheets of IV tubes dripping saline and morphine How many stories of drugs that would haul you along in their wake for a while but finally let you sink

A typical line of thought went something like this: I am anxious. The anxiety makes it impossible to concentrate. Because it is impossible to concentrate, I will make an unforgivable mistake at work. Because I will make an unforgivable mistake at work, I will be fired. Because I will be fired, I will not be able to pay my rent. Because I will not be able to pay my rent, I will be forced to have sex for money in an alley behind Fenway Park. Because I will be forced to have sex for money in an alley behind Fenway Park, I will contract HIV. Because I will contract HIV, I will develop full-blown AIDS. Because I will develop full-blown AIDS, I will die disgraced and alone.

Continuum was a magazine that denied the existence of HIV/AIDS. It stopped publication in 2001 after all its editorial staff died of AIDS.

Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.

Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.

Some women would not have contracted an STD or STDs had they not been on the pill.

Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.

Remember—as hard as this seems to you now, it's nothing compared to what our patients are facing.

Unprotected sex is often a subconscious attempt to commit delayed assisted suicide.

Because of things such as drugs and alcohol, countless people, most of whom are female, do not know that they were once raped, many of them more than once.

One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in medical research. Uganda was one of the biggest sources of these animals. As the monkey trade was established throughout central Africa, the native workers in the system, the monkey trappers and handlers, were exposed to large numbers of wild monkeys, some of which were carrying unusual viruses. These animals, in turn, were being jammed together in cages, exposed to one another, passing viruses back and forth. Furthermore, different species of monkeys were mixed together. It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation of HIV. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade?

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates.

Among the studies conducted by the Center, four assessed smoked marijuana's ability to alleviate neuropathic pain, a notoriously difficult to treat type of nerve pain associated with cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, spinal cord injury and many other debilitating conditions. Each of the trials found that cannabis consistently reduced patients' pain levels to a degree that was as good or better than currently available medications.

Even the spate of clearly well-intentioned films about AIDS only added to the certainty that gay characters wind up dead by the final reel. After all, in the movies, no one lives with HIV ... perhaps the ultimate stigmatization.

Globally, household air pollution is the leading environmental cause of death and disability, ahead of unsafe water and lack of sanitation, and it is responsible for more premature deaths than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.

Jabez would have continued to lament in sorrow until he died with no hope of amend, if he was unwilling to change that predicaments through prayer. A person is helpless until he prays. Your situation remains when you don’t pray and disappear when you pray aright. Cancers can break off by prayers, HIV and AIDS can be handled in prayers. The horrors of abusive relationship can be dissolved by prayer. Every challenges of your life can be arrested by prayers. No condition is permanent when prayer is invoked.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

November 2, 1984 was an especially tragic day in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/AIDS epidemic. That was the day Anthony Fauci became the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIAID). (Good Intentions p.128) It was the day a thin-skinned, physically ultra-diminutive man with a legendary Napoleonic attitude was positioned by destiny to become the de facto AIDS Czar. In the fog of culpability that constitutes what could be called "Holocaust II" one thing is clear: the buck, on its way to the very top of the government, at least pauses at the megalomaniac desk of Anthony Fauci.

This one adult could have died from AIDS with little notice....He could have transmitted the virus to his wife and offspring. His infected wife (or girlfriend) could have given birth in a Swedish barrack to a child who was HIV infected but seemingly healthy. Unsterilized needles and syringes could have spread the virus from child to child.

There is a disease that is out there. It spread faster than rumors. More deadly than nuclear weapon. More dangerous than Ebola , AIDS and HIV combined. This disease is called double standards. Many are suffering and dying because of double standards. It makes people overlook reality and facts, but concentrate on lies, hate and propaganda. Be true to yourself -

these glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more.

As for my own answers to any of this? I have none. I'm far more confused than before I first went. I've had no great epiphanies, no profound realisations, but since returning home I've resigned myself to this one thing: that, putting the economics and politics of it all aside - naive as that may be - what it all boils down to is individuals. It's a simple interaction between just two people: one, a person with opportunities and choices, and who could get a flight out tomorrow should they choose; the other, a person with few options - if any. If nothing else, it's a gesture. An attempt. Food and a tent for Toto. Burns dressing for Jose. A little operating theatre with car batteries and boiled instruments, where Roberto can ply his trade. Free HIV treatment for Elizabeth, who'll never be cured and will always live in a hut anyway, but who'll have a longer, healthier life because of it. And sometimes it's little more than a bed in which to die peacefully, attended to by family and health workers... but hey, that's no small thing in some parts. My head says it's futile. My heart knows differently.

For instance,” said Alan, “we’re now learning that the smallpox pandemics of the Middle Ages, not the plague, mind you, but smallpox, left generations of people with a rare genetic defect that protects them against infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. We estimate that approximately one percent of people descended from northern Europeans are virtually immune to HIV infection.

To his fans at Our House, he was a symbol that having HIV or AIDS did not mean that you had to go hide in exile. You could stay in the game, be social, snatch trophies and *live.* The literature about HIV that I read and shared, by gay men for gay men, emphasized a focus on living with HIV, rather than on dying. But that was all theoretical, just words, until they could see it in practice.

The reality of AIDS in America is that gay men of color-finding no home in either their birth communities or the highly commercialized, white gay world-represent the majority of HIV infection in America. The time has come for the gay community to take responsibility for reaching these gay men as gay men, insisting that their lives are as important as the first group of gay men lost to AIDS in the 1980s.

reconstructions of that period is the fact that subsequently Gallo’s so-called French co-discoverer, Luc Montagnier, had surprisingly indicated that HIV was actually not sufficient to cause AIDS. Montagnier had uncovered evidence that bacteria called mycoplasmas are necessary to stimulate HIV, making mycoplasmas at least a co-factor of AIDS, and possibly even more important than HIV, raising the scandalous question of whether HIV was even the cause of AIDS. Root

Just as Rolland and I know that together with our team, God has given us the nation of Mozambique, our dear friends Brian and Pamela Jourden know that the Lord has a great revival to birth in Zimbabwe and across Africa. Many prophetic words have been released over their lives, and financial miracles grow their ministry. When they started Generation Won/Iris Zimbabwe in 2008, Zimbabwe had gone from being one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, called the “breadbasket of Africa,” to being the poorest nation in the world. God spoke to them that Zimbabwe, which means house of stones, was like the stone the builders rejected, Jesus, but it would become a cornerstone nation, just as Jesus is the chief cornerstone, and a house of prayer for all nations. They have over twenty churches among three tribes, and they have seen HIV/AIDS and cancer miraculously healed as they preach the gospel. God is also opening doors with national leaders.

We have commoditized wellness & creativity, and so gay men are up against these much larger contexts that aren't particularly conducive to the strongest, healthiest, most holistic approaches. Access to basic healthcare, and a healthcare system that is not homophobic and that is responsive to the needs of gay men, would radically change the pressures and therefore the opoprtunities for those of us who work primarily within the HIV/AIDS sector of healthcare, whether in research, programming and cultural production, or advocacy. Similarly with the arts: if we had sufficient and adequate funding for community-based arts programming--of all kinds, not just related to gay men and HIV--then it wouldn't seem so shocking and misappropriated to allocate some of those funds for gay men to tell their stories. So it's in this larger, structural context that we gt forced into very painful conversations about prioritizing of funding, or what's most important, and it's always a reductive conversation because of limited resources. --Patrick "Pato" Hebert

Without money of my own, I had no doctors, no hormones, no surgeries. Without money of my own, I had no independence, no control over my life and my body. No one person forced me or my friends into the sex trade; we were groomed by an entire system that failed us and a society that refused to see us. No one cared about or accounted for us. We were disposable, and we knew that. So we used the resources we had—our bodies—to navigate this failed state, doing dirty, dangerous work that increased our risk of HIV/AIDS, criminalization, and violence.

This extends beyond MLMs, of course, to the white women wellness space. Take a gander at Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness brand. Celebrities have a knack for convincing women that they can afford the designer lifestyle and all the products that go with it, and it will make their lives better. Goop has made headlines for selling vagina crystals and co-opting controversial doctors (ones who argue that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, for example). Many find that the health benefits of their products don't quite match up to what they sell, and why would they? Goop's goal isn't health - the goal is to make Gwyneth Paltrow richer.

AIDS education taught us the importance of protecting our bodies from contact with other bodies, and this seems to have bred another kind of insularity, a preoccupation with the integrity of the individual immune system. Building, boosting, and supplementing one’s personal immune system is a kind of cultural obsession of the moment. I know mothers who believe this is a viable substitute for vaccination, and who understand themselves as raising children with superior immune systems. But children with superior immune systems can still pass disease. Pertussis, like polio and Hib disease and HIV, can be carried without symptoms.

Yes, our social and economic circumstances shape decisions we make about all sorts of things in life, including sex. Sometimes they rob us of the power to make any decisions at all. But of all human activity, sex is among the least likely to fit neatly into the blueprint of rational decision making favoured by economists. To quote my friend Claire in Istanbul, sex is about 'conquest, fantasy, projection, infatuation, mood, anger, vanity, love, pissing off your parents, the risk of getting caught, the pleasure of cuddling afterwards, the thrill of having a secret, feeling desirable, feeling like a man, feeling like a woman, bragging to your mates the next day, getting to see what someone looks like naked and a million-and-one-other-things.' When sex isn't fun, it is often lucrative, or part of a bargain which gives you access to something you want or need. If HIV is spread by 'poverty and gender equality', how come countries that have plenty of both, such as Bangladesh, have virtually no HIV? How come South Africa and Botswana, which have the highest female literacy and per capita incomes in Africa, are awash with HIV, while countries that score low on both - such as Guinea, Somalia, Mali, and Sierra Leone - have epidemics that are negligible by comparison? How come in country after country across Africa itself, from Cameroon to Uganda to Zimbabwe and in a dozen other countries as well, HIV is lowest in the poorest households, and highest in the richest households? And how is it that in many countries, more educated women are more likely to be infested with HIV than women with no schooling? For all its cultural and political overtones, HIV is an infectious disease. Forgive me for thinking like an epidemiologist, but it seems to me that if we want to explain why there is more of it in one place than another, we should go back and take a look at the way it is spread.

It would be a mistake to imagine that drug companies are the only people applying pressure for fast approvals. Patients can also feel they are being deprived of access to drugs, especially if they are desperate. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s the key public drive for faster approvals came from an alliance forged between drug companies and AIDS activists such as ACT UP. At the time, HIV and AIDS had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and young, previously healthy gay men were falling ill and dying in terrifying numbers, with no treatment available. We don’t care, they explained, if the drugs that are currently being researched for effectiveness might kill us: we want them, because we’re dying anyway. Losing a couple of months of life because a currently unapproved drug turned out to be dangerous was nothing, compared to a shot at a normal lifespan. In an extreme form, the HIV-positive community was exemplifying the very best motivations that drive people to participate in clinical trials: they were prepared to take a risk, in the hope of finding better treatments for themselves or others like them in the future. To achieve this goal they blocked traffic on Wall Street, marched on the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and campaigned tirelessly for faster approvals.

The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, “The poor homosexuals–they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.

Some diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, have slid down the list, but among the diseases whose incidence has increased the most over the past generation is chronic kidney disease. The number of deaths has doubled.14 This has been blamed on our “meat-sweet” diet.15 Excess table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup consumption is associated with increased blood pressure and uric acid levels, both of which can damage the kidney. The saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol found in animal products and junk food are also associated with impaired kidney function, and meat protein increases the acid load to the kidneys, boosting ammonia production and potentially damaging our sensitive kidney cells.16 This is why a restriction of protein intake is often recommended to chronic kidney disease patients to

Diseases of the future, needless to say, are a matter of high concern to public health officials and scientists. There’s no reason to assume that AIDS will stand unique, in our time, as the only such global disaster caused by a strange microbe emerging from some other animal. Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you’re a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it’s a vastly lethal pandemic.) Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people? The concept by now is so codified, in fact, that we could think of it as the NBO. The chief difference between HIV-1 and the NBO may turn out to be that HIV-1 does its killing so slowly. Most other new viruses work fast.

Now the hurt, angry and scared little boy was easy to spot behind the mawkish facade. Carol and I made calls and got Raleigh admitted to a halfway house where he could stay temporarily. I called Fred Goodson and had him come see Raleigh and bring him into their newly formed support group. Though we had given Raleigh information about TAP and the support group, it had probably been too much to expect him to follow up on his own. In putting Raleigh under Fred’s care, I had as secure a feeling as if I had put him in professional therapy. Joyce, my secretary at the VA, explored a job-training possibility for Raleigh. What had happened to Raleigh was a forceful reminder to me that there was a lot I could do, a lot I had to do, for our patients even if we had no therapy for HIV. I could no longer sit and be the consultant and pontificate over the progression (or lack thereof) of the disease; I was providing primary care, total care for this group of patients, whether I liked it or not.

I realize how moronic it is, flirting with the idea of uprooting my life and leaving my rent-stabilized place to live forty-five minutes closer to a guy I've been fucking for nine weeks - and not even really fucking, technically, because after the first blow job I gave him, I got strep, which I always get when I give someone new a blow job, and which necessitated oral antibiotics, which dulled the efficacy of my birth control, but Jon didn't want to use condoms, so we couldn't have intercourse, and he was going down on me so much that I got a yeast infection, which then turned into bacterial vaginosis, which necessitated a vaginal antibiotic inserted with an applicator nightly for a week, which caused a rash, which I convinced myself, after seeing an Instagram infographic about how HIV can live undetectable in the human body for up to ten years, had to be late-stage AIDS, a line of thinking that gave me debilitating diarrhea, which is of course a symptom of late-stage AIDS, which got me so worked up that I made an early-morning trip to urgent care for an HIV test, which was negative, which relieved the diarrhea but not the rash, which required a trip to the gynecologist...

Social science now tells us that if we can take indigent girls between the ages of 10 and 14 and give them a basic education, we can change the fabric of an entire community. If we can capture them in that fleeting window, great social advances can be achieved. Give enough young girls an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down; the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Child marriages will be less common; child labor, too. Better farming practices will be put into place, which means better nutrition will follow, and overall family health in that community will climb. Educated girls, as former World Bank official Barbara Herz has written, tend to insist that their children be educated. And when a nation has smaller, healthier, better-educated families, economic productivity shoots up, environmental pressures ease, and everyone is better-off. As Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard University president, put it: “Educating girls may be the single highest return investment available in the developing world.” Why is that? Well, you can make all the interpretations you like; you can posit the gendered arguments; but the numbers do not lie.

In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.

George W. Bush’s initiative to fight AIDS around the world, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), saved millions of lives in Africa and elsewhere. From the program’s launch in 2003 to the time Bush left office, the number of HIV-infected people in Africa getting proper treatment went from fewer than fifty thousand to two million. 19 His efforts didn’t go unnoticed by the people of the African continent. When President Bush took a farewell tour of Africa near the end of his second term, massive crowds of grateful Africans cheered for him. 20 Despite massive spending increases spearheaded by Obama, he cut funding for PEPFAR21 and deprived hundreds of thousands of people around of treatment. This inexplicable decision had a devastating effect on Africa, where most AIDS deaths occur. 22 The AIDS Healthcare Foundation was highly critical of Obama’s cuts, which came after he had promised to expand the fight against AIDS months earlier: “This latest action merely confirms what people with HIV/ AIDS and their advocates have long suspected—the President simply is not committed to fighting global AIDS. Coming on the heels of the President’s flowery rhetoric last December, the cynicism is simply breathtaking,” said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which provides free HIV/ AIDS medical care to over 125,000 people in 26 countries abroad. 23 The lesson for Africans: American friendship was fickle and patronizing and they couldn’t trust our promises. And we wonder why ISIS propaganda was so attractive to North Africans.

But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane? All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.

Gejala HIV HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) adalah virus yang merusak sistem kekebalan tubuh, dengan menginfeksi dan menghancurkan sel CD4. Semakin banyak sel CD4 yang dihancurkan, kekebalan tubuh akan semakin lemah, sehingga rentan diserang berbagai penyakit. Untuk Info Segera Hubungi Kami HP/WA 081 329 878 999 Infeksi HIV yang tidak segera ditangani akan berkembang menjadi kondisi serius yang disebut AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). AIDS adalah stadium akhir dari infeksi virus HIV. Pada tahap ini, kemampuan tubuh untuk melawan infeksi sudah hilang sepenuhnya. Sampai saat ini belum ada obat untuk menangani HIV dan AIDS. Akan tetapi, ada obat untuk memperlambat perkembangan penyakit tersebut, dan dapat meningkatkan harapan hidup penderita. Tipe HIV Virus HIV terbagi menjadi 2 tipe utama, yaitu HIV-1 dan HIV-2. Masing-masing tipe terbagi lagi menjadi beberapa subtipe. Pada banyak kasus, infeksi HIV disebabkan oleh HIV-1, 90% di antaranya adalah HIV-1 subtipe M. Sedangkan HIV-2 diketahui hanya menyerang sebagian kecil individu, terutama di Afrika Barat. Infeksi HIV dapat disebabkan oleh lebih dari 1 subtipe virus, terutama bila seseorang tertular lebih dari 1 orang. Kondisi ini disebut dengan superinfeksi. Meski kondisi ini hanya terjadi kurang dari 4% penderita HIV, risiko superinfeksi cukup tinggi pada 3 tahun pertama setelah terinfeksi. Untuk Info Segera Hubungi Kami HP/WA 081 329 878 999 HIV dan AIDS di Indonesia Berdasarkan data Kementerian Kesehatan RI, selama tahun 2016 terdapat lebih dari 40 ribu kasus infeksi HIV di Indonesia. Dari jumlah tersebut, HIV paling sering terjadi pada heteroseksual, diikuti lelaki seks lelaki (LSL), dan pengguna NAPZA suntik (penasun). Di tahun yang sama, lebih dari 7000 orang menderita AIDS, dengan jumlah kematian lebih dari 800 orang. Data terakhir Kemenkes RI menunjukkan, pada rentang Januari hingga Maret 2017 saja sudah tercatat lebih dari 10.000 laporan infeksi HIV, dan tidak kurang dari 650 kasus AIDS di Indonesia. Gejala HIV dibagi dalam beberapa tahap. Tahap pertama adalah tahap infeksi akut, dan terjadi pada beberapa bulan pertama setelah seseorang terinfeksi HIV. Pada tahap ini, sistem kekebalan tubuh orang yang terinfeksi membentuk antibodi untuk melawan virus HIV. Pada banyak kasus, gejala pada tahap ini muncul 1-2 bulan setelah infeksi terjadi. Penderita umumnya tidak menyadari telah terinfeksi HIV. Hal ini karena gejala yang muncul mirip dengan gejala penyakit flu, serta dapat hilang dan kambuh kembali. Perlu diketahui, pada tahap ini jumlah virus di aliran darah cukup tinggi. Oleh karena itu, penyebaran infeksi lebih mudah terjadi pada tahap ini.

That the AIDS pandemic is traceable to a single contingent event. That this event involved a bloody interaction between one chimpanzee and one human. That it occurred in southeastern Cameroon, around the year 1908, give or take. That it led to the proliferation of one strain of virus, now known as HIV-1 group M. That this virus was probably lethal in chimpanzees before the spillover occurred, and that it was certainly lethal in humans afterward. That from southeastern Cameroon it must have traveled downriver, along the Sangha and then the Congo, to Brazzaville and Léopoldville. That from those entrepôts it spread to the world.

As the new century began, AIDS researchers pondered this roster of different viral lineages: seven groups of HIV-2 and three groups of HIV-1. The seven groups of HIV-2, distinct as they were from one another, all resembled SIVsm, the virus endemic in sooty mangabeys. (So did the later addition, group H.) The three kinds of HIV-1 all resembled SIVcpz, from chimps. (The eventual fourth kind, group P, is most closely related to SIV from gorillas.) Now here’s the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers. In other words, HIV hasn’t happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history. Therefore it wasn’t a highly improbable event. It wasn’t a singular piece of vastly unlikely bad luck, striking humankind with devastating results—like a comet come knuckleballing across the infinitude of space to smack planet Earth and extinguish the dinosaurs. No. The arrival of HIV in human bloodstreams was, on the contrary, part of a small trend. Due to the nature of our interactions with African primates, it seems to occur pretty often.

1986, American Physician Doctor Robert Strecker stated that HIV was not only a man-made bio-weapon created by the US military, but that it was disseminated by the WHO in Africa in the 1970’s by inserting the killer virus into smallpox vaccines. Strecker’s theory went on to suggest the distribution of HIV did not stop with Africa, but continued in the US. According to the doctor, the outbreak of AIDS

Here’s hoping this HIV/AIDS conspiracy theory ain’t true!

Here’s what you have come to understand. That the AIDS pandemic is traceable to a single contingent event. That this event involved a bloody interaction between one chimpanzee and one human. That it occurred in southeastern Cameroon, around the year 1908, give or take. That it led to the proliferation of one strain of virus, now known as HIV-1 group M. That this virus was probably lethal in chimpanzees before the spillover occurred, and that it was certainly lethal in humans afterward. That from southeastern Cameroon it must have traveled downriver, along the Sangha and then the Congo, to Brazzaville and Léopoldville. That from those entrepôts it spread to the world.

The conditions promoting the upsurge in the US were multiple: the concurrent epidemic of HIV/AIDS, immigration from countries with a high prevalence of tuberculosis, the spread of drug resistance, and the lack of patient adherence to the standard treatment regimen, especially among people who were homeless, mentally ill, or impoverished. Most important, however, was the decision to dismantle the tuberculosis campaign as a result of the confident assumption that antibiotics would eliminate the disease.

The global AIDS epidemic, therefore, is a major determinant of the TB pandemic that followed in its wake. In combination, they are known as HIV/TB.

Furthermore, Western motives appeared mysterious. Why was the international community so intent on ridding Nigeria of polio when other local needs were more pressing? Nigerians questioned the plausibility of a campaign against polio when they were far more concerned with safe water, poverty, and diseases that were more prevalent, such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS.