There has been a lot of politics into this disease, the reality is that we have not been ready to deal with HIV, our disability laws are at best inadequate to deal with this type of disease, and our health care paying system is geared toward big profit for insurers, who dump patients into the public programs.
The bottom line is that HIV is an incurable, terminal disease, which at best we can keep at bay today. It affects the working age of our population (today I saw two new patients, just diagnosed, a 20 y/o heterosexual male in college, and a 26 y/o single mother), the main age group of this epidemic is 20-50 y/o. (We will see the Viagra effect within the next two years). The number doubles every four years, that means that in 2004 we will have 4 million HIV infected in the US, (120 million worlwide), by 2012 16 million US,(480 million worlwide). There is no other disease that is growing at this rate, and affecting the segment of the population that HIV affects. If HIV research is cut, if no cure, or effective vaccine is found within the next ten years, we will have chaos. The pharmaceutical companies are making billions in the treatment of AIDS in the Northern Hemisphere, while the rest of the world is dying. If something came out of the Geneva conference, is the disparity between the North and the South. Furthermore, there is no vaccine, and from the latest findings with Live Attenuated Virus Vaccines, in the words of Gallo "We are back to 1984". For too long the US Govmt, and others have not paid attention to what is going on, this is the largest, deadliest epidemic that we have had, and it affects our youth. The world governments better make an all out effort to find a cure, fast, or any other disease will not matter.
JLL |
