Only Half of the Solution

Frontdesk
by David Waggoner

Last month A&U wrote about looking back at the eighties and everything that’s retro about the virus. But now it seems the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would have us look even further back—to the Stone Ages. The CDC has shifted its funding priorities away from preventing infection among those men and women who are negative to targeting their
education efforts at HIV-positives. Putting the onus of responsibility squarely on HIVers is not very farsighted. In other words, scaring kids to death about HIV isn't working—in the eyes of
the CDC—but stigmatizing those living with HIV is okay. Once again, it’s the blame game.

It’s a strange ounce of prevention that won't be producing anywhere near a pound of cure. In fact, it’s crazy when you take into account that the government has been trying to cut the more than 40,000 new infections in half by next year. And how do they propose doing this? By ignoring the fact that half of every new viral transmission occurs when two people—not just one person—are engaged in either unsafe sexual or drug use activity.

If we’re going backwards in time, why not stop halfway back to the Stone Age and take a look at Roman times. Condoms were commonly used, aqueducts and highways brought clean water and the best of Roman goods to even the farthest flung village from the center of the action. The Romans were also good at taking the census of their far-flung empire. It helped them account
for the whereabouts of every potential taxpayer. Better health and better organization were ensured by these measures, but the power through which all of this was achieved was often oppressive. Clean water, after all, didn’t stop the barbarians from sacking Rome. Is history about to repeat itself? Has today’s federal healthcare system gone too far in trying to control an
epidemic that can only be stopped by the actions of those it most affects?

Today, the CDC, in all its imperial prescience, has decided to become all-powerful too through a tracking system that supposedly determines the true extent of the epidemic in this country. This desire by the federal government to know to what extent the virus is continuing to roll into
vulnerable populations will only lead to more paranoia, fear of persons living with AIDS, and a certain amount of hysteria where it’s least needed these days: the public health system. Today’s health authorities are bent on improving the collection of data but not necessarily the number of new infections. According to the Associated Press’s Daniel Lee, “the government is unveiling a new surveillance system to better track HIV infections, scrapping an existing method that doesn't
indicate how recently patients were infected.” These days, in order to promote safer sex and to ensure that transmission routes are halted, the CDC has distributed new testing kits to over ninety per cent of those communities that have been identified as hot spots in the epidemic. They can even identify how recently you were infected. Therefore, more funds can be allotted to areas where there are upsurges in barebacking and illicit drug use. The sex police have arrived with their little black testing kits.

This common concern about the civil rights of HIV-positive individuals is voiced by David Harvey of the AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth and Families in Washington, who tells the AP’s Lee: “No doubt [the CDC’s new prevention approach] will provide a more accurate picture of the epidemic but it’s coming full-scale against the debate over how to best do it and protect” the privacy of people already HIV-positive. Once again, the virus will be going underground; testing sites will become places feared and not respected; and HIV will have found a new way to spread—through the overzealous ambitions of prevention bureaucrats carrying testing kits and not condoms.

August 2003