World AIDS Day

I don't have as much to say about World AIDS Day as I should. When my book on AIDS prevention education came out, I railed against the people who had lost interest in addressing the pandemic, who had moved on to other things. But in the dozen years since then, I'm afraid I've done the same thing. I haven't lost interest, but I did become overwhelmed with the size of the problem and the obstacles faced in dealing with it. Just about the time the book came out, AIDS drug cocktails were developed that made HIV manageable. Up until then, a diagnosis of AIDS brought fears of a wasting disease that would lead to death. Not to be unnecessarily blunt, but once the presumption of death was off the table, there wasn't the same desperation to find a cure or hone prevention efforts. People still die of AIDS, of course, but it's not nearly as inevitable. So we still acknowledge World AIDS Day, but we don't get too excited about it. And we don't particularly pay attention to the fact that AIDS remains just as deadly as it ever was to those who can't afford the cocktail--in this country or around the world, where the numbers are much higher. We don't go out of our way to push for something beyond abstinence-only sex education. We just figure that--for the most part, at least--we'll be fine.

If you're interested in finding out a little bit for yourself, UNAids has some materials for the day, as does the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. If you're in the U.K., you might be interested in this page sponsored by the National AIDS Trust. In U.S. papers, Laura Bush had an op-ed in The Washington Post that didn't end up to be as innocuous as it could've been--she even mentioned condoms! As far as I can tell, The New York Times didn't have anything on their print editorial page, but they featured an online column by Josh Ruxin calling various international AIDS organizations to task. AIDS isn't as deadly as it once was, and it doesn't have the spotlight that it once did. But it's got a long way to go before it stops being a concern. Let's just hope that we can give a bit more focus to fighting the disease and preventing its spread before another few World AIDS Days pass us by.