Today you’ll hear a lot about World AIDS Day. In fact, you probably have already heard it about a thousand times. Everyone will be breaking out their red stuff to show support and solidarity, and there will be numerous reports trying to relate AIDS back to you, the average everyday American.
You’ll hear lots of things about Africa, lots of things about New York and San Francisco, and then you’ll be told all about education classes and condom distribution centers that are set up by organizations like Gay Men’s Health Crisis to combat the disease.
You’ll probably also be told that AIDS is an equal-opportunity disease and everyone is at risk if they aren’t careful. That’s when you need to tune out the person saying it because that’s when the rhetoric slips into propaganda mode.
For the last few years I’ve done the same thing on World AIDS day; research. I research the CDC AIDS information and relate the statistics to the average person. I also break it down into simpler data and present it in a way that demonstrates one undeniable truth about the way the disease is reported in this country and, as far as I know, the rest of the world.
Here’s a controversial statement to get us going, and I say confidential not because the data is disputable, but because the conclusion I draw from the data is one you simply won’t hear from the talking heads that are going to regale you with terrible stories of teenage girls in the midwest who are pretty, affluent, not drug users, engage in no risky behaviors, and are infected. The controversial statement: AIDS is not an equal-opportunity disease.
That’s right, folks. AIDS, contrary to the media message of the past 25+ years, does discriminate, and the numbers do not lie.
That’s right, folks. If you don’t engage in any of the high risk activities as classified by the CDC (homsexual sexual contact, particularly male to male, or injection drug use) there’s an 80% chance you won’t get the disease. That hardly demonstrates a tendency toward equal infection.
Many of you are going to be upset by this post, and that’s fine.
To clarify, I’m not writing this post to dismiss AIDS or to say it’s some gay disease and we should all not worry about it. It’s tragic that over 36 million people are living day in and day out with a disease that could turn something as simple as a common cold into a death sentence. With that being said, we’ll never find the cure if we’re not even honest with ourselves about where it lives and how you’re most likely to get it.
It would be akin to turning over 20 rocks to find a bird, while only looking up in one tree and concluding that birds are equally likely to be under a rock as they are to be up in a tree.
Take this day, and instead of buying into the propaganda, or wearing a red shirt or buying a red iPod, show your support by insisting that the people researching the disease actually research the disease rather than spend countless dollars on advertising and PSA’s that lie to the population about their risk for getting the disease.
The facts are simple. Heterosexual monogamous non-injection drug users are almost completely not at risk. Let’s focus our attention on those that are and solve this thing once and for all.
