The PC treatment of disease
In the early 90s I wrote a research paper on HIV and contact tracing. Initially, I had assumed that HIV would be treated in the same way as other diseases spread by sexual contact such as syphilis, and that contact tracing would be a big part of the approach to controlling it.
I was wrong. How very wrong I didn’t discover until I started researching the paper. I interviewed public health authorities, and grew increasingly stunned by the answers they gave me. Those time-honored methods had been jettisoned, and why? There were a number of reasons, but the main one was politics. Gay rights groups had the public health people frightened of doing anything to limit their sexual habits, and many of the public health people didn’t even need intimidating because they had already internalized the idea that the rights of patients to absolute privacy should be the paramount consideration.
An even greater consideration than keeping people from dying, which was the almost invariable result of HIV infection back then.
The insistence that you not ask “What for?” will probably soon become the insistence that you don’t ask “Who or what, exactly?”
Rule out teleology, and what remains for instrumental reason to use as a standard for evaluation? What is it, even, that is on that take, “doing” the reasoning?
Sometimes I think that when some such as Kolani or myself or others here, use the term “nihilist” in public discourse to describe the deep mindset of the post-modern leftist and progressive movements, others imagine that we are just lobbing rhetorical bombs, or engaging in invective.
People who visit and interact here, or even pay attention to the society around them, obviously know better.
And we elected an unqualified man for president because it was PC to vote for him.
Perhaps the SS head was a similar appointment.
The homosexual activists claimed the homosexual lifestyle was natural, normal and healthy. Aids is primarily a disease of intravenous drug users and homosexuals. The facts didn’t fit the narrative so the facts must be ignored.
OFF TOPIC
Cannot seem to find a way to email you.
Hopefully, you have a moderator who will get this to the proper place. If not, consider it my entry into the “Most inappropriate comment EVER” contest.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/maycie/this-hilarious-ballet-shows-that-imperfection-can-be-beautif#91j5d0
Thought you might appreciate this. Don’t see a lot of ballet humor these days.
And Oh so obvious at the time. And so denied by the PC “elite”.
notherbob2:
Look at the photo at top, the one with the books, the apple, and the ballet slippers on the table. Then look directly below it and you’ll see three red tabs. The one in the middle says “email.” Click on it and you’ll find my email address.
notherbob2:
About that ballet video—I think the mistakes were part of the intended choreography. I think it was a comic ballet.
Cute idea.
So why can’t mosquitoes carry Ebola?
didn’t even need intimidating because they had already internalized the idea that the rights of patients to absolute privacy should be the paramount consideration.
The Gaystapo had a lot of experience, even back then. They didn’t reach the Mozilla CEO burning level immediately.
Ymarsakar:
The reason that mosquitoes don’t appear to carry Ebola is similar to the reason they don’t carry (or spread) AIDS.
Basically, to spread a disease the mosquito has to be infected with the virus and then have a mechanism to place it in the person. Mosquito-borne diseases are spread through the mosquitoes’ saliva, which they inject into the person, not by blood-to-blood injection. Mosquitoes ingest the blood and it goes into their digestive system as a meal, and is not re-injected into the next victim:
This was the beginning of the end of competent contagion control in the USA. The CDC had successfully reduced malaria by mosquito control before DDT and finished it with DDT. I remember when West Nile first entered the USA. Rudy Giuliani in about 2 days had helicopters spraying for mosquitos in the metro area, but the Gold Coast of Connecticut resisted and only got occasional sprays of a much less effective insecticide. We might not have been able to eliminate West Nile but we didn’t even give it a proper try. So now people, birds and horses die every year.
HIV, West Nile, Dengue etc. Our green and PC responses are pathetic.
covered in:
http://neoneocon.com/2014/10/01/ebola-questions-for-the-cdc-and-the-government/#comment-833440
William Park felt: uncertain about the health department’s authority to deprive a healthy Mary Mallon of her liberty “for perhaps her whole life.”
Thomas DarIington, commissioner of health when Mallon was taken, admitted to a reporter that there was “considerable doubt as to the legal right of the health officials to detain the germ woman. She had violated no laws.”
The New York American reported that health officials were going “to appeal to eminent lawyers to determine what action they can take.
t was not until late June, 1909, two years and three months after her initial arrest, that newspapers revealed her identity because the opportunity came for Mary Mallon to test her banishment in a court of law. At that time she and her lawyer, George Francis O’Neill, filed a writ of habeas corpus, initiating a legal proceeding guaranteed all citizens.
She “is a prisoner for life,” wrote the reporter, even though she has committed no crime, has never been accused of an immoral or wicked act, and has never been a prisoner in any court nor has she been sentenced to imprisonment by any judge.”
Nowhere in the U.S. Supreme Court decision did the justices rule that people could be forcibly vaccinated against their will. As legal expert James Tobey concluded from his analysis of vaccination laws in general and Jacobson v. Massachusetts in particular, “Compulsory vaccination means that all persons may be required to submit to vaccination for the common good; and if they refuse …they may be arrested, fined, imprisoned, quarantined, isolated, or excluded from school …but they cannot be forcibly vaccinated, desirable as such a procedure might be from the standpoint of public health protection.”
If such an act as this can be done in the case of any person said to be infected with typhoid germs, it can be perpetrated in the cases of thousands of persons in this city who might be said to be infected with tuberculosis and other kindred diseases. If the mere statement that a person is infected with germs is sufficient, then that person can be taken away from his or her home and family and locked up and imprisoned for life
It is quite a problem if a municipality can, without legal warrant, or due process of law, clap some one in jail upon the word of some medical man. If the Board of Health can act this way with any one who is alleged to be a germ carrier, yet who never suffered from the disease, then it can put thousands upon thousands of persons who suffered at some time or another from typhoid fever in confinement
If one unfortunate woman must be labeled “Typhoid Mary,” why not send her other companions? Start a colony on some unpleasant island call it “Uncle Sam’s suspects,” there collect Measles Sammy, Tonsilitis Joseph, Scarlet Fever Sally, Mumps Matilda, and Meningitis Matthew. Add Typhoid Mary, request the sterilized prayers of all religionized germ fanatics, and then leave the United States to enjoy the glorious freedom of the American flag under a medical monarchy
aaron aids?
Mary Mallon’s legal case brings to light an important question: is it possible to protect the health of the population and at the same time not infringe on individual liberty?
Current fears of living in a police state put limits on plans to isolate large numbers of people, even in the face of potential public health dangers. Mass isolation has been used in Cuba, where the state has created a community within the boundaries of which all AIDS sufferers must live, but such authoritarian behavior on the part of the government in the United States would not easily be met with cooperation
Artfldgr:
Twelve to eighteen people is what’s involved in Dallas, not a mass quarantine of an entire population. Nor is it a quarantine “for life.” I forget what the time frame is, but it’s a few weeks I believe.
Index case
The index case may indicate the source of the disease, the possible spread, and which reservoir holds the disease in between outbreaks. The index case is the first patient that indicates the existence of an outbreak. Earlier cases may be found and are labeled primary, secondary, tertiary, etc
“Patient Zero” was used to refer to the index case in the spread of HIV in North America
Gaé«tan Dugas was patient zero for AIDs
Mary Mallon (a.k.a. “Typhoid Mary”) was an index case of a typhoid outbreak.
The first recorded victim of the Ebola virus was a 44-year-old schoolteacher named Mabalo Lokela, who died 8 September 1976, 14 days after symptom onse
64-year-old Liu Jianlun, a Guangdong doctor, transmitted SARS during a stay in the Hong Kong Metropole Hotel in 2003
A baby in the Lewis House at 40 Broad Street is considered the index patient in the 1854 cholera outbreak in the Soho neighborhood of London.
é‰dgar Enrique Herné¡ndez may be patient zero of the 2009 swine flu outbreak
there are others not listed, like the first person to get the desease out west from mous urine, the first person to get legioinairres desease, etc. but it was mary mallon that the legal issues were most argued on and set by.
neo-neocon
didnt say they were for life… or anythig… just that mary mallone is the legal case that set the precident in the early part of last century… it was her being lockd away and the court cases that ensued that attempted to unravel which doctrine took precidence… personal freedom, or public good. the issue still has not really been resolved constitutionally… while in places like cuba, it was easy. create the modern equivalent of a leper colony…
but given that leper colonies were in the bible, the idea of controlling desease by either isolating the carriers, or isolating the potential victims (mask of the red death), has been a ongoing problem with no easy solution as it pits reverence for the individual against reverence for the public
from the publics view point, the answer is easy, deny freedom, and lock em away. the public feels this with ebola, and other things… ie. isolate liberia, a whole nation from the rest of the world for the safety of the world… given that liberia will always have a reserve in the species that carry the condition before humans have acquired it, it may seem rational to do so.
but from the perspective of mary malone, and others, their only crime is the accidental aquisition of a virus, and that is not a crime. while we find it pretty easy to say that a person that comits murder can be locked away for life, what about a desease carrier, who has committed no crime, but who still can leave death behind them in greater numbers than serial killers?
its not an easy question, and not one i have an answer for at all… not if one respects both conditions of perosnal vs public. they are at odds with each other, as often they are politically…
it all begs to the other similar questions, does a free person have a right to their property, or is their property available to the public for their good.
at its heart its the same question
at its heart, it exists like those doodled squares that exist in a illusory supposition in which sometimes they appear one way, and sometimes they appear one way, and no single answer will suffice that can encompass the two confliciting views.
for those that care to know, its called a nekker cube
The Necker cube is an optical illusion first published as a rhomboid in 1832 by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker.
oh. by 1930, there were over 400 mary mallone type carriers of typhoid. the US solved the issue for the most part by forbiddig idiots and others at ellis island from entering… ie. aboided the question by restricting entry
given our open borders, we have abandoned that “push off” answer to the complications.
notherbob2:
It’s the “Mistake Waltz” from Jerome Robbins’ comic ballet “The Concert.”
Artfldgr:
Agreed it is not an easy question at all.
Neo, good to know.
Ironic that in order to assuage the concerns of the “gay community,” the time-honored methods of disease tracing were jettisoned for HIV, which resulted in the deaths of more gays. Great logic, guys.
I feel like it’s worth stepping in here to make a note about the gay response to the AIDS crisis and the legacy that it left.
I doubt most of you (neo excluded, given her knowledge of theatre) have seen The Normal Heart, a movie version of which HBO has recently produced. It is the story of a gay journalist trying to raise awareness about AIDS within the gay community and to lobby the government and public health institutions to act on AIDS. The response he gets from the institutional “gay community” (the “Gaystapo,” I suppose, in Ymarsakar’s word) is overwhelmingly hostile, since they interpret his concern that their sexual habits are endangering all of them as homophobia. They refuse to wear condoms, essentially, because that would be “a step backward” from the sexual liberation they had only so recently achieved (or thought they had achieved).
What is significant nowadays is not that hostile response of the gay community in the 80s, but rather, the response of gay people today to that movie. No gay man I know–and I know quite a few, being one myself–sympathizes with the “gay community” that exists in that movie, that refuses to wear condoms. The response of every gay man to that movie nowadays is “why won’t those idiots just put on a rubber?”
In fact, the “gay community” today is almost militantly aware of AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases. For instance, there is a retroviral drug called Truvada (also called PreP) that is taken rather like the birth control pill, which significantly reduces the chance of being infected by HIV. The response of the “gay community” to this drug is not a celebration because now we can have all the unprotected sex we want. On the contrary, the response has been one of ambivalence, if not rejection, and the reasoning goes like this: “PreP encourages unprotected sex.” The response of the “institutional gay community” has turned from flagrant negligence to almost puritanical adherence to wearing protection during sex.
I just thought this was good food for thought for the “Gaystapo” crowd, because while gay men might have been horrifically negligent and (frankly) dumb about sexually-transmitted infections in the past, the exact opposite is true today. That’s not very well-known outside of the gay community, though, so if all you know about the gay community is how they reacted to the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s, then you would have a poor opinion indeed of the gay community nowadays.
Zamzam:
It’s good to hear that.
The response of that community was awful for a long time, and a lot of transmission occurred as a result, I believe. I wrote that paper around 1990 or so.
It sounds like what you’re describing is a generational thing, at least in part. AIDS began to be an issue about 35 years ago, so a huge percentage of the sexually active gay men today have grown up with it (anyone under 45, I’d say) and have incorporated it into their lives much more than the previous generations did, the ones who had just gotten used to a “liberated” sexual lifestyle and didn’t want anything to rain on that parade.
Currently, we are turning the collegiate world upside down because of a disputable statistic that 1 in 5 women will be a victim of sexual assault.
Unprotected Gay sex results in an almost 1 in 2 chance of HIV infection, yet nothing is said. No legislation. No awareness campaign. Nothing.
That says a lot.
Homosexual activists must make sure homosexuals are suffering, whether from social rejection or HIV. Cause otherwise, it’d be like Democrats being elected and then fixing the poverty that is the black abortion community of single mothers.
Do you really think they would do that? They wouldn’t, cause they know that if they fix the problem they caused, they won’t be given power any more. So no more private jets, no more Michelle O vacations in Europe and Hawaii.
Limbaugh mentioned that today: the handling of what was initially nicknamed “the gay plague” was, in medical terms, criminally negligent (my phrase, not his: he was more circumspect).
A lot of people died who didn’t have to.
And can we talk about how HIV got into the nation’s blood supply? More victims.
David Horowitz wrote about this in _Radical Son_ and right he was. I was around in San Francisco back when AIDS was first discovered. I remember reading the article that said there was this strange… “gay cancer”… I found it disturbing even then without knowing much more than two or three otherwise young and healthy gay men had died of a weird and rare form of cancer (Karposis’ Sarcoma) that generally did not strike men like them. This must have been 1981 or early 1982. Then, once it was determined that * something * not yet understood was infecting gay men in particular and that it was likely transmitted sexually, I also remember the fights about closing the bath houses. It became about politics, and while I understand those politics, the politics of sexual liberation, obviously that was not the time for that particular battle.
I guess the left does this a lot. This was horrific. Now, we have ISIS and radical Islam generally and so many on the left have been in denial or making it about something else (Islamophobia). So far, not a squeak like this about Ebola, some things are too horrible to even make into political issues. Well, not yet. AIDS was plenty horrible, but …
I remember to this day they blame Reagan.
They should, without Reagan they would control the minds of several million more black and white Americans.
The Left operates on “mysteries”. You’ll know what’s in ACA after we pass it. The Holy Bible is written in the holy language, and it will be read for you by priests. You cannot read the holy language yourself if you are not a priest.
The more they don’t know, the more mysterious it is, and the more powerful their faith. And the more misguided perhaps. Evil 2.