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Viral Discrimination
A Tale Of Two Holocausts

 April 18, 2003

Well, they’re at it again.  In another act of political grandstanding, the social conservatives and religious right, under the leadership of the Bush Administration, have instituted a quarantine policy for those who either are or might be infected with the highly contagious Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).  Or at least that would be the transposition of logic if you listened to HIV/AIDS activist Brad Sears. 

SARS, as noted, is a highly contagious virus whose symptoms include high fever, aches, dry cough and shortness of breath.  Presently, there is no cure and untreated it is deadly, although most of the infected have recovered with intensive medical care. 

SARS is the first disease added to the quarantine list in over two decades.  It joins cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, bubonic plague, smallpox, yellow fever and several other hemorrhagic fevers for which health authorities can isolate Americans involuntarily.  Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson explained that, “This authority would only be used if someone posed a threat to public health and refused to cooperate with a voluntary request.”   

This action was prompted by a woman on a flight from China arriving in the U.S. who showed SARS symptoms but refused treatment before boarding a train for her next destination.  After exposing multitudes in the train to her illness, the woman’s condition finally deteriorated to a point where she sought treatment.  Subsequently, she recovered. 

At least 85 people of some 2200 SARS infected individuals worldwide have thus far died from the virus.  The United States has a suspected 115 cases throughout 29 states.  At present, there have been no U.S. SARS mortalities. 

In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were searching for the carrier of another infectious virus that rendered five Los Angeles area residents critically ill.  The five suffered from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, all were in their twenties and all were homosexuals. 

The CDC found the carrier of this disease and identified the man some call “Patient Zero” as Gaetan Dugas, a French-Canadian airline steward.  Dugas was carrying and spreading Gay-related Immune Deficiency (GRID), which reincarnated into the more politically correct Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). 

Dugas was well known by the West coast homosexual community from his frequenting of gay bars and bathhouses in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto and New York.  By his own estimates, Dugas tallied 250 new homosexual contacts per year for a lifetime total of 2500 different sexual partners.  The infection rates promulgated by this type of behavior are exponential.  If his 250 contacts in 1980 each had even 50 new contacts themselves that same year who, in turn, had 25 new contacts…well, you do the math.  In mortality terms it is the equivalent of distributing assault weapons and ammunition to violent street gangs and their children and their children’s children. 

When belatedly asked by physicians to cease his sexual activity, Dugas snipped, “Somebody gave this thing to me.  I’m not going to give up sex.”  It was further reported that during post-coital Tête-À-Têtes Dugas would point to the cancerous lesions on his body and jeer to his latest victim that, “I have gay cancer.  I’m going to die and so are you!”  Dugas’ homicidal behavior was allowed to continue until his death from AIDS on March 30, 1984.  Furthermore, it wasn’t until 1985 that the various local, state and federal government agencies in America finally shut the doors of the notorious orgy bathhouses.  By then it was too late because the AIDS virus had become a pandemic.  

Even when the government took serious notice of the AIDS pandemic, there was never an attempt at isolation and eradication.  The focus became another money-pit of treatment and hopes for a cure.  Treatment and cure are proper avenues for any disease, but, given the rather overt methods of AIDS transmission, early isolation of those infected and strict immigration health screening would have been more productive.  Isolation was the most direct path to national eradication thus sparing the American public from this pandemic.  That is why the U.S. health authorities have a quarantine policy. 

From the early roots of the AIDS pandemic in the late 1970’s through the present, over 21 million people have died from the disease.  Out of the 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS, five million were newly infected in 2002 alone.  In 2002, HIV/AIDS associated illnesses caused approximately 3.1 million deaths.  The CDC estimates that there are between 850,000 to 950,000 U.S. residents with the HIV infection of which 25% are unaware that they are infected.  There are 40,000 new cases of HIV infection in the U.S. each year and, as of December 31, 2001, 467,910 U.S. deaths have resulted from AIDS. 

It’s a curious dichotomy when one woman on a flight from China is the catalyst for a U.S. quarantine for a disease that thus far has claimed no U.S. lives, but HIV infected victims are allowed to wonder the streets of America, copulating and drug abusing at will to further victimize the uninfected. 

In a publication from the AIDS Project Los Angeles entitled, “Barebacking & HIV Disclosure: What’s the Law,” author Brad Sears lists the 5 inclusive acts that one would have to commit in order to be prosecuted for spreading AIDS under California’s “Willfull Exposure” law. 

1.      Have anal or vaginal sex.

2.      Know that you are HIV-positive.

3.      Fail to disclose your HIV status.

4.      Fail to use a condom.

5.      Have the “specific intent” to infect the other person. 

Sears notes that, “While California’s willful exposure law may seem like just another way to make scapegoats out of people living with HIV, it is extremely lenient…27 other states have established criminal penalties for knowingly transmitting or exposing another person to HIV…these statutes have been passed as the result of political grandstanding by social conservatives and the religious right.”   

Not to worry because Sears advises, “…the law is narrowed in scope to only cover individuals who want to infect other people, and who are probably expressing that desire.  If you slipup one time, it’s unlikely that you will be prosecuted.”  Perhaps that same exemption can be extended to other selfish acts of attempted murder.  “I put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger for pleasure.  It may take him 10 or 15 years to die from his wounds at great taxpayer expense, but I only ‘slipped up’ once.” 

A report in GayHealth by Sarah Albert finds that, “A recent study of MSM (men who have sex with men) and barebacking (Gay men engaging in unprotected anal intercourse) conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that approximately 14 percent of MSM intentionally seek out and have unprotected anal sex, and this does not even include MSM who have unplanned unsafe sex.”  With over 40,000 new HIV cases in the U.S. each year, that 14% of barebacking buckaroos are all committing murder with almost total immunity. 

In another report illustrating socially reprehensible behavior, Albert cites a new study conducted by the Centers for HIV Educational Studies and Training (CHEST) in New York City, “Eighty percent of the HIV-positive participants reported having insertive anal sex without a condom and 36 percent said they never used condoms with their sex partners...Overall the men report an average of 35 sex partners in the last three months.”

This irresponsibility flies in the face of the approximately $15,000 per year it costs the health care system to treat the average HIV-positive victim. 

In her paper, “The Rights of HIV-Positive Health Care Providers,” Catherine Hanssens, Esq., AIDS Project Director for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund itemizes 4 criteria that must be used, “in determining whether a person disabled by a communicable disease poses a ‘significant risk’ sufficient to justify discrimination.” 

1. The nature of the risk (how the disease is transmitted),

2. The duration of the risk (how long the carrier is infectious),

3. The severity of the risk (the potential harm to third parties), and

4. The probability that the disease will be transmitted and cause varying degrees of harm.

If these criteria are applied to the question of the health risk posed to American society by non-disclosing HIV-positive offenders practicing unprotected sex en-mass the conclusions are obvious.  The nature of the risk is high because it is primarily transferred through barebacking, unprotected vaginal sex and the swallowing of semen and menstrual blood.  The only way HIV originally found itself into an IV needle was resultant from an original unprotected sexual act. 

The duration of the risk is a lifetime since HIV is presently incurable.  The potential harm to third parties is lethal.  A single undisclosed act of barebacking could be a death sentence for the unsuspecting lover.  The probability that the disease will be transmitted is extremely high given the growth rates of HIV infection and the high percentage of irresponsible sex on the part of large segments of those presently infected. 

In Hanssens’ own words we are, “Thirteen years into the pandemic….”.  A woman exiting an airplane from China with the sniffles can be quarantined to prevent the spread of a disease that has thus far claimed zero U.S. lives, but with almost one million HIV positive individuals in America and almost 500,000 U.S. AIDS deaths, this government still allows felonies such as the 14% of the MSM population actively seeking unprotected sex to go unchecked. 

The 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic claimed 500,000 U.S. lives and 20-50 million worldwide.  The AIDS pandemic has equaled this and is surpassing it as you read these words.  Why is it that the U.S. and other world governments are so quick to act decisively in the case of SARS, which is still relatively minor in scope, while they continue to drag their feet in the AIDS pandemic?  Quarantine and immigration health screening for SARS are absolutely the best short-term prevention. They will isolate the virus from the general population and, in doing so; eradicate it long enough for a cure to be found.   

If an irresponsible and deadly percentage of HIV-positive individuals will not act voluntarily to protect the general population from the further spread of this virus, the offenders should be quarantined from the population in order to accomplish what they themselves refused to do; the isolation and eradication of the virus from the general population until a permanent cure can be found.  This was done with polio, tuberculosis, smallpox and now SARS.  AIDS is a holocaust upon us; SARS is a possible holocaust pending. 

Isolation in the case of irresponsible HIV-positive barebackers, prostitutes and drug abusers is no more a violation of civil liberties than the quarantining of a smallpox outbreak.  And, it is certainly not homophobic unless one also considers a SARS infected victim being prevented from coughing inside of a packed subway car to be equally homophobic.   

It is only hoped that the government will implement a more proactive and effective national health policy to deal with the pandemic threat of the SARS virus than was the case with the reactive and relatively ineffective patchwork of band-aids applied to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. 

To reduce this argument to the dogmatic name-calling of homophobia and anti-civil liberties for either virus constitutes selfishness equally reprehensible as the carnal pleasure derived from the 14% of murdering barebackers and other infesters continually spreading HIV/AIDS.   Resultant from the relative virulence of its transmission, the consequences of an unchecked SARS pandemic would be devastating on an international basis.  And, it would take significantly less social irresponsibility on the behalf of SARS carriers to create that pandemic.  It is a matter of societal good and survival.  When it concerns people, deadly viruses do not discriminate and when it concerns deadly viruses, people should similarly not discriminate.

 

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