From: jbarth@ep.ieee.org (Jeremy Barth)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Subject: Re: Human rights in the USA.
Date: 8 Jan 93 13:44:50 GMT
Reply-To: jbarth@ep.ieee.org
Organization: IEEE, New York, NY

Greetings, Edelmiro.  Continuing our jousting:

>Yes, there are shortages of basic medicines in Cuba.  

>>If there are shortages of basic medicine, what about the ultra-expensive yet 
>>ineffective "treatments" for that incurable, yes INCURABLE, disease called AIDS?

Yes, AIDS is incurable, but there's more to treatment than just high-tech
pharmaceuticals.  There's proper nutrition, rest, stress reduction, etc.
These aren't a cure, of course, but they most likely lengthen life by
reducing *added* stress to the immune system.  If you've got AIDS and also
happen to have no home, eat poorly, and can rarely sleep more than an hour
or two at a time, you're likely to die much sooner.  

>There is
>an economic depression there after all, due in part to economic
>mismanagement on the part of the Cuban state, but also due in no
>small part to the US embargo and to the control of commodity
>prices by the G-10 countries.

>> In other words, the collapse of communism terminated Cuba's subsidies.

In part, yes.  But in case you've forgotten the Third World debt crisis,
which almost destroyed the international banking system in the early-mid
1980's, massive financial mismanagement by US banks, abetted by Federal
Reserve policy that emphasized reduction of inflation to the detriment
of debtors *everywhere* (e.g. US manufacturers and all Third World
debtors), capitalism screws up as well.  And by the way, Cuba is not
the only country that has had to rely on foreign subsidies:  dozens
of countries throughout the world regularly receive large amounts of
foreign aid, including Indonesia, Korea, Egypt, Israel among the
largest.  And have I missed something, or isn't the US itself
massively in debt, to the tune of several hundred billion dollars?

>>Precisely!  You can get treatment if you're covered by insurance.
>>But 37 million Americans are NOT covered by any form of insurance,
>>and another 50 million are UNDERinsured.  (These numbers are from
>>the Government Accounting Office.)  Tens of thousands of AIDS
>>sufferers in the US are not getting treatment:  read the medical
>>journals and the government reports.

>Well OK, tens of thousands are also not being treated for the common cold

Come on, you know I'm not talking about the common cold.  If you're not
insured, you can be financially wiped out by any serious illness.  There 
are millions of our fellow American citizens who live daily on the edge of 
disaster.  Don't you realize this, or are you living in some kind of dream 
world?


>> In the mean time will continue to pump billions of dollars in AIDS 
>> research while our women die...

I agree with you that there are important questions as to how our
tax dollars should spent on public health problems.  But AIDS is not a 
trivial problem.  To date, three times as many people have died of it 
in the US as all US servicemen who died in the Vietnam war (about 160,000 
to 55,000).  And all public health experts say we're still only at the 
beginning a major pandemic. Nobody knows the future course of the disease, 
and it's folly of a major order to assume anything less than the worst.  

Some math:  if the number of infected individuals doubles every three 
years, it takes about 30 years to go from 1,000 to 1,000,000.  In only 
two decades more, that number is up to 128,000,000.  Nobody knows what
the true rate of spread is; it might be less or more.  What's certain
is that AIDS is no longer confined to just one sub-population.  In certain 
parts of the world the disease has carried over strongly into the 
heterosexual population and it is already the leading cause of death among 
adults in several urban centers in Africa. It could happen in the US and 
Europe ... nobody really knows.

Witness what happened with TB in the US:  in 1983 the Centers for Disease 
Control requested $35 million from Congress and the Administration to 
fight a re-emerging TB epidemic.  They didn't get the money.  Now, ten 
years later, TB is out of control in our major cities, and many cases are 
drug resistant.  It's a public health disaster of the first magnitude that 
could have been avoided had people not stuck their heads in the sand.


>>Well why the hell do you accuse us of being primary "exporters" or AIDS...

Well, in 1989 about 60% of the identified AIDS cases worldwide were in
the US (the real numbers were likely different, but that's what was
officially known to public health authorities at WHO).  So the likelihood
of a US citizen infecting a visitor from abroad, or of infecting someone
in a foreign country while visiting there, was logically higher than
the likelihood of getting infected themselves.  It's not a "moral"
statement, just a statement of probability.

>> Jeremy, how can we "export" a disease which is non-infectuous?
>> ... my uncle is a pathologist, by chance, one of the first to detect the 
>> disease in our country, and he has also told me first hand how others have 
>> *imported* it here.

Actually I misspoke:  the correct term (as used by the INS) is "contagious."
The difference, though, between a contagious disease like TB and a non-
contagious disease like AIDS is in the dictionary.  Your doctor uncle
may well have some of the following scholarly journals in his library.  
If you're serious about understanding the issues, why not check out some
of these articles? 

- Gostin, Larry. "Public Health Strategies for Confronting AIDS: Legislative
  and Regulatory Policy in the US," Journal of the American Medical
  Association, 1989. 261(1): 1621-1630.

- Wolchok, Carol. "AIDS at the Frontier: United States Immigration Policy."
  J. Legal Med., 10(1) 1989.

- Dickens, B.M.  "Legal Rights and Duties in the AIDS Epicemic," Science,
  1988 (239): 580-585.

Among the groups that have urged the US to change its AIDS immigration policy
are the World Health Organization, the European Economic Community, and even
the US Presidential Commission on AIDS that was originally convened by 
President Reagan years ago.  

Have a good weekend.


Jeremy
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america