Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, got it. At first I thought you were one of those crazy people saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV.
Those people exist ? This world, man ...
Kary Mullis, the inventor of polymerase chain reaction, is an HIV denialist.
Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
51–60 of 151 posts
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
STDs are hardly propaganda, and promiscuity does indeed increase the risk. Besides she was clearly a troubled youth, with sexual abuse home and her further abusive relationships conveyed early in the movie.
Aids was invented by the right wing propaganda machine to punish homosexuals though, so tomato tomato.
Don't be absurd... PR firms wouldn't have anything to do with coordinated biowarfare campaigns.
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#53An article like this makes you wonder how many different diseases (answer - over 200) get lumped together under the large "cancer" umbrella. One wonders if we are doing ourselves a disservice maintaining a term more inline with shared symptoms instead of separating the diseases into shared causes. At any rate I'm digressing, but cancer is a fascinating (while horrible) concept that exists in our reality. When you thi…
I always though cancer was an umbrella term for when a cell mutates in such a fashion to lose it's reproductive throttle, and consequently starts consuming as many resources as possible, eventually fragmenting and spreading throughout the body. What kind of cancers don't fit this definition?
I don't know but the sarcoma the articles says is a symptom present in the last stages of AIDS, when the body is covered with brown "patches" - mostly in the back.
Other doctors were investigating other issues at the time, like a strong TB. But it took time for all this different specialists see it was one illness.
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that AIDS wasn't a high priority for Reagan, but from my vantage point it looks like HIV is an instance of an enormously complicated biological challenge being addressed with extraordinary effectiveness and rapidity by the medical establishment. I take your point (and the sibling commenter's point) about the epidemiologic response to AIDS; I may be over-fixated on the research and development side of the is…
What about SARS back in 2003? China first observed SARS in Nov 2002 but didn't report it until February 2003. The responsible virus was identified by April 2003 and the whole disease contained by July. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndro... I'm not an epidemiologist so I can't compare the relative complexity of the SARS virus to HIV. But I'm skeptical that HIV presented a massive and insurmou…
Of course, SARS was 30 years later...
To get some perspective, 1981 was as close to 2013 as it was to 1949.
Edit: Yes, I meant 2013, thanks. Point being: I remember the mid (not early) 80's and it SEEMS so recent and modern but it's as far removed from our life today as 1950's life was then.
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#55My vote for the key quote (from the bottom of the article): "Dr. Friedman-Kien said he had tested nine of the victims and found severe defects in their immunological systems. The patients had serious malfunctions of two types of cells called T and B cell lymphocytes, which have important roles in fighting infections and cancer. But Dr. Friedman-Kien emphasized that the researchers did not know whether the immunologic…
It was scientists working on leukemia and white-cell cancers that made the eventual discovery of HIV-1. Initially, the virus was classified as HTLV-IIIb before getting it's own name.
At the time there was also a bit of a dispute between American and French researchers over credit for the discovery and subsequent development of the diagnostic test.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14881-was-robert-gallo...
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#56I'm currently reading And The Band Played On which is a detailed account of the rise of the AIDS epidemic and how it was ignored and mishandled back in the 80s. Definitely check it out if this subject interests you.
Curious: if we call t_0 1981, the Kaposi's Sarcoma article, and t_x 1996, the advent of HAART, and consider (t_x - t_0) "the AIDS epidemic" --- ignoring the ongoing epidemics in Sub-Saharan African and India, which are enormous problems but somewhat orthogonal to the problem described by your book --- what comparably lethal disease in human history was more effectively addressed by the medical establishment? How can…
There is a difference between effectively managed by the medical establishment and what Reagan / america did in the 80s. I'm at work and I don't have sources readily available, but my understanding is that many older gay people (those still alive) hate reagan and republicans specifically because they slow rolled the response to hiv. Much of America's response wasn't really pushed until the Clinton administration. So how much of the below is the legitimate difficulty of rapidly responding to a new disease is arguable, but I don't think anyone can make a real case that if a new disease had appeared in the 80s that affected straight white men that it wouldn't have gotten a much more vigorous response from the reagan administration/fda/etc. At bare minimum, by the first time reagan mentioned aids publicly, 20,849 Americans had died from it [1]. How he squared his conscience with not mentioning aids until twenty thousand americans had died is amazing.
A brief history mostly off the top of my head
1 - reagan didn't care at all about aids until an actor friend of his died of it;
2 - the strong perception within the fda was that reagan didn't care about aids / didn't want anything done about it;
3 - reagan allowed his staff to delete a mention of ryan white from a speech;
4 - reagan didn't mention aids publicly until mid 1987
Writing in the Washington Post in late 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los
Angeles, stated: "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as
6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's
existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right
supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals." [1]
6 - I don't remember this as well, but I believe hiv patients also had to fight the fda for early-ending of clinical trials, because they were insisting that people taking placebos should basically die
So some of this is similar to why many gay people of the right age hate Ed Koch, but an aggressive intervention by the reagan administration might have saved many lives.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Reagan-s-AID...
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it was pretty obvious. Was also a tad annoying as because she was liberal and anti war and was a sexually liberated woman...well then she is a whore that will get her payback by being given aids. I thought it was a good movie but it had touches of right-wing propaganda.
STDs are hardly propaganda, and promiscuity does indeed increase the risk. Besides she was clearly a troubled youth, with sexual abuse home and her further abusive relationships conveyed early in the movie.
Major Dan was getting it on with prostitutes but he doesn't get aids. It also showed the anti war guy just happens to be a women beater...
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#58[deleted]
Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
#59Today is the 60th birthday of a friend who has been HIV+ since 1983. When we met, ca. 1986, I didn't expect him to live long. I am pleased beyond my ability to express that I was completely wrong. The party he and his husband are throwing on Sunday will be epic.