RE: AIDS

Fact: spreading HIV/AIDS is entirely preventable by confining sex activity for the carriers to others who are carrying. It would be wonderful if those who are single, who are carriers, would voluntarily embrace such a health measure with their own "dating networks" and resolve to be sexual only with others who have the disease --and if all people would resolve to marry and be monogamous; that would help all people, carriers or not. It's the tendency toward promiscuously following our urges without engaging our brains, that is responsible for the epidemic everywhere.

If AIDS ever becomes easily managed and/or cured by affordable means, so be it. And more power to the present medications.

But right now,

"In a typical country, the cost of treating a single person for AIDS for one year is about 2.7 times the gross national product per capita." "On average, treating a person for AIDS costs more than the annual cost of educating 10 primary school students. These data are from before the more expensive antiretroviral treatments became available." (from a World Bank article online)

Wash Post said "the cost is upwards of $30,000 a year for the treatment"

(this is for those who are on maintenance programs to keep from developing full blown AIDS --which can cost even more in treatment of all the diseases and the process of dying which one gets from the immune deficiency.)

Many think the taxpayers should take care of their conditions acquired by their sex activity --or would be happy if the research companies would fund AIDS research and the resulting drugs at no cost --so we can continue our abnormal pursuit of an abnormal way to have sex --homosexual anal sex is the principle CAUSE of introduction and the early spread of AIDS in our country. Now, as then, if people avoid sexual and promiscuous behaviors, they can avoid the disease.

However, SINCE infected people aren't very good at resisting sexual temptation to have sex with uninfected people --usually because the infected aren't telling --the disease continues to rage with too many new cases annually --but we don't hear as much about it because the drugs are keeping the victims alive as carriers--at great expense, more than most any patient or his insurance co. can really afford.

In a very promiscuous and infected culture --as in Africa, quarantine may be the only way to eradicate the disease from the earth, or, at least, get control of it.

Quarantine would also be a good idea IF the disease were as highly infectious as first speculated regarding restaurant workers, healthcare workers, and public restroom concerns. But it would appear that sex and IV drugs (and birth by carriers) are still the main ways the disease is being passed -- though birth transmission is no longer inevitable, in that there are some drug remedies re: the newborns, as I understand it

Nearly the whole nation, however, is in the same boat --by either smoking, drinking, overeating --or promiscuity or illicit drugs --Most of us, including me, have some self-induced disabilities or risks or conditions --for which we hope that Medicare, Medicaid or insurance companies will pay. At least when we buy health insurance, or work to pay into the gov't care systems, we are helping to pay for our self-induced misery--but it does drive up the costs. Healthy choices would be a better way to go for the health economy.

We need to treat AIDS and HIV like any other health condition instead of one with stigma --about which everyone is hush hush--just adding to the problem. However, prevention of the disease has to impact on the gay lifestyle which is so frequently unabashedly promiscuous--but no more so than straight culture is becoming.

"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible