From: ez000281@hamlet.ucdavis.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Subject: Re: Human rights in the USA.
Date: 9 Jan 93 05:49:01 GMT
Organization: Computing Services, UC Davis

Greetings, Jeremy.  Continuing our jousting:

Jeremy you say...

>Yes, AIDS is incurable, but there's more to treatment than just high-tech
>pharmaceuticals.  

Ah, so you are finally admitting that Cuban AIDS patients don't get the 
high-tech drugs, and instead AIDS prisons have to rely on...

>There's proper nutrition, rest, stress reduction, etc.

In a country where cats are being eaten, and dissidents are clobbered.

>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.

I wonder who the hell was the Dr. who is "treating" Magic Johnson for his 
incurable disease.  He must be a chiropractor or a quack, for if your view of 
proper "treatment" is effective, he should have never stepped a foot on the 
court, with all that stress and excersise, he should have died instantly.


>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.  

Screwed up?? We've only had a mild recession.  Wall Street is doing fine and 
consumer confidence is rising.

>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?

The U.S. "debt" is mainly with istself.  Everyone who owns government bonds, 
is owed by our government.  So, we owe it mainly to ourselves.

>Come on, you know I'm not talking about the common cold.  

Of course not, buy I am.  You don't use (nor should you provide coverage for) 
high-tech ultra expensive "treatments" on a cold, cause they don't work.  
They'll make you feel a little better, but... well I'll leave the 
tecnichalities to you to figure out.

>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?

Well if your insured and you get HIV you'll also be wiped out by a serious 
illness no matter how much coverage you get. These fellow American citizens you 
mention above simply don't realize (well, OK, many do) they can go to public 
hospitals and get free medical care if they're poor.  Medical care that might 
not be as good as that of John Hopkins Medical Center, but should do the job, 
and it is 100 times better that having a Cuban witch "doctor" no medicine.  
What happens in our country is that families with a home don't want to buy 
medical insurance 'cause the want to invest it in beer, and we ultimately have 
to pay it for them from our taxes, which go straight into county hospitals and 
clinics, etc.

>> 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.  

So.  Breast cancer isn't a trivial problem as well, and we spend much more 
money in AIDS research, trying to find a cure that seems very very remote, 
while simple reasearch into cancer detection has been left off the list simply 
'cause its a disease which attacks females.

>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).  

Well, lung cancer is probably worse.  And we don't see extremists ransacking 
the conferences denouncing the lack of funding for cancer research.   If we 
would simply spend the same ammount of effort we spend in anti smoking 
campaigns (which I believe is very little) into campaigns which predicate 
abstinence and "safer" sex, perhaps we wouldn't have so many victims of AIDS.  
Of course many people would have to sacrifice their current libertinage.

>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.

Well you know public health "experts" are usually wrong, especially when they 
say we're at the "begining" of something for which we cannot predict a "future 
course".  And since it's future is unknown it is irresponsible for us to press 
the panic button and spend many more billion in wonder cures, while the rest of 
our population smokes itself to death.

>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.  

Well if nobody knows what the future holds, how do we know were at the 
"beginning a major pandemic".  Your above statement contains an important "if" 
which makes it very speculative.  What's worse, if it holds, and you are right, 
and it turns out to be a major "pandemic" which infects half of our population, 
then we should certainly send out the Army and round up all the infected ones 
now before its too late, and follow the Cuban model.  But we should never do 
this (assuming your "pandemic") simply to keep our hookers clean so that some 
Canadian can go on a sex tour of Sunset Boulevard.  If you are right Jeremy, 
you are simply providing the ammunition for the immediate mandatory testing of 
everybody in the U.S. and taking the appropiate health measures to avoid the 
spread of this infectious disease which threatens half of our population.

>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. 

Of course, no condoms, no education, no restraint, and no government, will 
certainly give you a major health emergency.  But here it happens to be MAINLY 
restricted to two groups: intravenous drug users, and people who stick their 
ding a lings in the wrong place with the wrong person.  So, I see no mayor 
crisis, unless of course, we start preaching free love and viva la coca.  But, 
of course in these times where people have forgotten the meaning of the word 
RESPONSABILITY, who know how many people will practice carpe diem and die a 
couple of months later.

>It could happen in the US and
>Europe ... nobody really knows.

Nobody, except, of course the publich health "experts" and Jeremy Barth, who 
are predicting a major "pandemic".

>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.

I don't think they stuck their heads in the sand, they stuck them in Barney 
Frank's rear end when they diverted so much money into the wonder cure for AIDS 
and ignored the warning of the REAL (not the international phonies) health 
experts of the CDC.  Well you know that Mexicans and poor people don't have a 
strong a lobby as the friends of Mr. Frank, and his efficient pimps.

>>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.

Yeah, but according to J. Barth we shouldn't worry infecting anybody, since 
AIDS is not "infectious" (now "contagious"), and thus we should assume the 
policy of "Give me your infected/contaged..." when what you have stated above 
just proves that having infected people roaming around the planet just spreads 
the thing more and more.  We simply don't need more people spreading it here 
just like these poor countries didn't need infected Marines roaming their 
brothels.

>> 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?

Perhaps, but I'll trust you at your word (and his) when you say that our 
soldier exported this "infectious" diseases to other countries, and I don't 
want foriegners bring it here and "infecting" more our fellow Americans.

>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.

Well you know the WHO and the UN have always been recommending lots of things 
to us and we feel our Public Health Experts are better prepared than these 
underpaied jerks, who are politicians first, and experts second.  After all, 
Magic Johnson was an acting member of the Presidential Commission, and what 
expertise (theoretical, that is) did he have on AIDS???

Have a good weekend.


Edelmiro

Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america