This week's question is
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
I was in my sexually active 20s when AIDS hit, but it was a distant thing, something that affected gays and IV drug users, and I was not in the vulnerable categories. But I watched as partners of acquaintances died of it, and I now have several friends who either contracted it and died, or whose partners or children did. I am greatly more worried about it now than I was in the 1980s.
What worries me is not that I or my family might get it - Australia immediately introduced a "safe sex" public education campaign (which, under the present conservative administration, has been losing its force, with an increase in unsafe sexual activities among younger gays in particular), and needle exchange programs became common. We aren't so moralistic as the US. These programs dramatically reduced infection rates here.
What worries me most is that the Reagan administration stood by for years, doing nothing because these groups were regarded as marginal and depraved, so years of potentially useful research were wasted. And now it's not just those who share blood or gay semen that are infected. Now it is a heterosexual disease that is causing despair and pain for millions. Of course, these are mostly Asian and African, so of course they don't matter to the west, do they?
Our parochialism is part of a larger problem of discrimination and prejudice that is resurging in the west. And it is affecting basic science. AIDS won't be solved by a targeted research program to find a vaccine or a magic bullet drug - it will be solved because basic science into the immune system and epidemiology is being done, and we learn enough to apply general results to this problem.
And then there's the woo science pushed for political reasons, not only in the US, or by the Vatican (which says that condoms don't prevent AIDS contrary to all evidence and theory), but by South African politicians like Thabo Mbeke, president of that country.
Health issues should not be the domain of political or religious intolerance. Nature cares nothing for ideologies. What worries me the most about HIV/AIDS is that it legitmated the interference in public health issues by ideologues, and that will affect all of us. We need to oppose this interference in science for all our sakes, and HIV is the first place to start, to prevent the sorts of things we have seen since from continuing.
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Never forget that the scoundrels at DI a few years back published a magazine specifically targeted at teenagers, insinuating that HIV does not cause AIDS -- with Nelson, Meyer, Dembski, and Behe on the editorial advisory board. To my knowledge none of them have ever disowned that publication, nor have they disowned Phillip Johnson's signing on to Deusberg's crusade.
Be very afraid.
Why do the ID people not want AIDS to be caused by HIV? Is it homophobia (AIDS is caused by God), the refusal to acknowledge that the HIV virus evolves, or other reasons?
I enjoy reading your blog. Thanks.
Well, it goes without saying that violent (not a hyperbole, when I say violent I mean violent) homophobia is a core pillar of the Christian Reconstructionists who are driving ID. So obviously that's part of it.
But since this is a phil-bio blog, I would venture that the "explanation" comes from an inability to accept that something that so disproportionately targets the people that they hate might be something morally neutral, like a mere virus, that you or I your daughter could get from an organ transplant. In the Designed World, everything has its sufficient teleological reason, and the reason has to be that the Lord of the Universe hates the same people you hate.