Posted on 04/23/2003 7:07:56 PM PDT by Dog Gone
I never thought Id say it, but I approve of Bush. Well, let me rephrase: King George II has finally done something of which I approve. On Friday, April 4, he added SARSsevere acute respiratory syndrometo the list of diseases that can call for a patient to be quarantined. The executive order, which allows for detainment or quarantine of people infected with SARS, is the first of its kind in 20 years. The last disease to be added was Ebola. Thats the one that causes you to bleed to death through every orifice of your body, including your eyes, and it has a fatally rate of more than 50 percent. Theres no treatment.
SARS is a severe viral pneumonia. Theres no treatment except supportive measures. Compared with Ebola, it has a much lowerbut still very scarydeath rate. Most people recover, but some, especially older people or others with health problems, cant fight it off and succumb in a matter of days.
Of course, there is no need to worry yet about massive quarantines. The last time anyone was detained in federal quarantine was 1963, to prevent the spread of smallpox. But at least this is being addressed early in the gameunlike the last deadly virus to come around in the early 1980s, HIV. Where were the executive orders then, the lead from the Centers for Disease Control (before it added and Prevention to its name) or the World Health Organization? Where was the government outcry, the immediate worldwide involvement?
Nowhere. Because just queers were dying.
Id like to think this response to SARS from the administration is one brought about by years of learning from the mistakes of how the HIV virus was handled. Alas, I doubt thats the case.
SARS swept the news and the world by storm in March and April after first appearing in China last November. (China later apologized for not letting everyone else know a little sooneroops!) Everyone began wearing masks in Hong Kong and Beijing, where the disease appears to have originated. People on planes complaining of flulike symptoms or fevers of 100.4 degrees or higher caused entire planes to be quarantined on runways until safety was assured. Because the respiratory ailment could be fatal, reaction was swift.
Whats eerie is that statements from the CDC and WHO could easily have been confused for statements about HIV 20 years ago. We dont know the exact cause yet, but it is believed Were not 100% sure of the way it is transmitted, but it appears to be We know the disease can be fatal This virus appears to spread rapidly, and we dont know very much about the epidemiology
As I watched And the Band Played Onthe HBO film passed along journalist Randy Shiltss history of the bungling of the early years of the AIDS epidemicon late-night television in the middle of all of this, I wondered what would it have been like if HIV had really been treated like a disease, and not a political or social condition.
In 1982 they were arguing in San Francisco whether or not to close the bathhouses. At that time, my late husband Andrew was 16 years old. What if they had closed the bathhouses? Quarantined those with HIV or at least those with clear symptoms of AIDS until they could figure this out? Would Andrew, my dear friend Lorenzo, Michael Mungarro, John Delicce, Frederick, Mark Rodgers (insert your names here) Would they all still be here now if Reagan had issued executive orders, if the gay community had shut their mouths and let the CDC work with impunity in the community? Id like to have at least seen what would have happened. They did finally close the bathhouses in 1985, but they reopened shortly thereafter. And now they are back and as popular ever.
What am I suggesting? That the government should have rounded up all the gays and tested them in the early days, as soon as the antibody test became available? Quarantine those found to be infected? Mandatory reporting of all sex partners? Well, maybe, if thats what needs to be done for viruses that kill people, spread like wildfire, and go on to decimate the world and an entire generation of gay men, not to mention Africans and Asians and so many dead. Maybe such extreme measures would not have been necessary; Im not a medical expert. But whatever needed doing, HIV should have been treated like a fatal communicable virus, just like SARS is being treated, just like any deadly agent of infectionit should have been handled however the medical experts deemed best, not the politicians, not the shouting homos crying out that their rights were being violated, not a generation painted as victims, not the civic leaders, not the business people, not talk show host or writers like menone of them.
The people in charge should have been the doctors, the virologists, the experts in the handling of a communicable infectious disease. What they said we should do, we should have done.
But SARS was and is different, you might say, because its airborne. Unlike HIV, SARS can be caught from a cough or even passing touch. Yes, HIV was sexually transmitted, for the most part. But we didnt know that at first. Some even thought HIV was airborne early on. No, HIV wasnt airborne, it proved to be an STD. So it should have been treated like one. For most STDs, diagnosis mandates the notification of sexual partners. Not HIV. With HIV, no one could be contacted because anonymity was demanded, the right to privacy invoked. For some reason it was a special STD. The reason? The gay communitys protest fell in line with the stigma and the fear from every side.
It was too scary, too shameful. No one wanted to know.
Ive heard all the arguments that measures like mandatory testing, possible quarantine, mandatory notification of partners and such would have pushed those suspected of having HIV underground. Well, lets look at what the converse didthe secrecy, the anonymity. How many dead? Over half a million in the United States alone as of 2002 and millionsalmost an entire continentworldwide. Monetary cost? Hundreds of billions. And in the past 20 years, did we find a cure to make it all better, to salve our guilt for letting it spread unchecked? Nope. We have partially effective treatments, some almost as deadly as the disease, and not so much as a potential vaccine, much less one that works.
Yes, our community, who screamed for our sexual freedom, got to continue having sex however we wanted. Ive always argued that anyone who has unprotected sex and is HIV positive is committing a criminal act, and if it can be proved, should be prosecuted for assault and battery. If someone had smallpox and knowingly went around infecting people, theyd be treated like a criminal, right? If someone who knew they had SARS decided to hop into a crowded bus or airplane and cough on everyone, wouldnt they be dragged away in handcuffs and quarantined? Oh, but not HIV: Today we have parties in bigger cities where people actually go to have sex with HIV-positive people: bug-chasing parties. Its criminal.
While I hold the Reagan administration, the CDC, and WHO to blame, I also shoulder a part of that blame as part of the gay community. We behaved so badlystill do, when it comes to AIDS. Our sexual freedom was worth all those lives, right? And what freedom was that, again? Because no one except the lunatic right ever suggested gay men stop having sex. They suggested we stop having unprotected sex. They suggested we should stop having sex in ways and places that put people at risk for infection. But no, even that was an infringement. The sexual freedom of the few hundred or thousands of gay men at the beginning who could have been legally forcedyes, even via quarantineto stop spreading this disease in America, that was more important than the lives of millions of others. It was more horrible to consider exactly the kinds of travel restrictions and mandatory testing of immigrants that were all supporting with SARS than it was to protect the hundreds of thousands of our gay brothers who would contract HIV and die.
All those steps at the beginning that are now being taken with SARS and could have been taken with HIV werent because AIDS took hold in an already oppressed community, one that the far right would have been happy to toss into internment camps with or without a deadly disease as an excuse. I understand what happened, I just cant figure out why. Its a virus. Its a medical condition. But we made it into a social condition, a political issue. Now its buried in politics and red ribbons and advertisements seem to tell us that its chic, as slick ads with buff men reassure us that we can live with HIV, no problem, dont worry about changing our lives. Its Magic Johnson time.
Perhaps the hoopla and early intervention in the case of SARS will stop this new infection. Who knows with a disease? Maybe extreme efforts at the beginning wouldnt have helped stop HIV. Well never know. Even now, we treat HIV like a stigma, not a virus. We dont report those with it to any central medical authority, dont notify their partners. We dont have mandatory testing for those at risk. In some places if a doctor is stuck by a needle accidentally, they cant even demand to test for HIV the blood of the person that the needle was in first. How ridiculous is that? Every other infectious, incurable disease has been treated differently, from Ebola to SARS.
As I look back on the last 20-plus years, I do see progress. Andrew lived most of his adult life with HIV thanks to new treatments. He died of what I allege is malpractice, not AIDS. He lived 13 years with it, and thats something.
But I also see so many mistakes. Made then, being made now, and I cry. Literally. That sappy movie And the Band Played On, a bad film by some accounts, made me cry for hours. Ive been grieving every two years for the past 20 years. And Ive had the easy part, Ive stayed behind. Tears are a luxury of the living. Angry? You bet Im angry. At myself, at the gay community, at the Reagan administration; Im even mad at the current Bush administration for their swift action in SARS, because there was so little action against HIV. Im angry because of all the goodbyes.
And Im angry that the mystery whether or not treating HIV as the deadly virus it is, like SARS, and not as a social or political condition, would have changed anything will never be solved. Ill never know if all those people really had to die, or if the religious right would have gotten their wish and all the gays in the US would be in a big camp in Montana somewhere. Well, never fear; if we were, Im sure Jeffrey Sanker would be there to throw the annual White Party, given all the snow. Thered still be lots of unprotected sex, because, hell, were all in this stupid AIDS camp anyway. Im sure thered be alcohol, and maybe even drugs other than AZT, Protease Inhibitors, etc., you know, E, X, K, because wed all be in one place how easy to distribute. Wait, this sounds like Palm Springs, West Hollywood, San Francisco maybe they all got their wish after all.
SARS is a virus that can kill. HIV is a virus that can kill. To a virologist, theyre the same in that they need to find the cause, find a treatment, and find a cure. They need to isolate them and contain them. They need to prevent them. Each is unique, yet much of the methodology is the same. But oh, to the people, how theyre so very different. To the people, SARS is a health threat wildly spreading while AIDS was, and is, an indictment on a culture. In this tale of two viruses there is no happy ending, but at least SARS has a better beginning.
One can only imagine the uproar.
Remember when they tried to close the bathhouses?
If education were the solution, the disease wouldn't even be a problem in this country today. It's not like SARS. Normal people are not at risk.
How quick they forget!!
We DID try to screen blood, prevent gays from giving blood, and people did talk about quarrantine, only the Gay lobby insisted we NOT do those things!!
My mother has been in the dance community in Atlanta (one of the epicenters of AIDS) for over 50 years. I was here and grown when AIDS struck Atlanta.
The then mayor, Andrew Young, was a very liberal and relatively young black man at that time. He wanted to close the bathhouses and use the normal quarantine-and-trace public health measures for AIDS.
His common-sense proposal was met with a firestorm of opposition by the very influential Atlanta gay community. He was threatened, protesters dogged him everywhere he went, and the usual liberal suspects joined the gays in screaming "civil rights violation!". The liberal newspapers joined in the cry for Young's blood, especially the little local papers like Creative Loafing and Southern Voice.
Andy wimped out and withdrew all his proposals. I think he was a coward to do so, but his political career would have been over instanter if he had persisted.
This author is blaming the Republicans when she needs to look in the mirror (or blame her deceased husband and his associates, which she will not do.)
SARS is not invited into one's life as a result of deviant behavior. SARS is not a behavior-based ailment (unless you count breathing as behavior).
This comparison is as disgusting as comparing eating meat to the Holocaust.
This author is very much a he and he seems to refer to his partner as his husband.
What I found striking about this article is that it acknowledges that conservatives were right all along. Of course, then it proceeds to blame them for not winning the argument over the objections of those, like himself, who fought us tooth and nail.
Interestingly, he doesn't mention what his own position was at the time. I'm sure he mirrored those of the gay community.
He writes like a stereotypical woman, too (emotional and blaming others).
Geez, isn't this joke a bit stale by now?
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