Physicians will face potential fines and jail time for reporting HIV by name to health officials. Partner notification is currently in shambles. Governor Gray Davis must acknowledge enough lives have been lost, and direct California health officials to follow CDC recommendations of reporting HIV by name and to do partner notification. More pamphlets won't do the trick. I urge all of you to push, demand, even beg for public health policy needed to contain the spread of HIV wherever you live.
Real prevention is our only hope in saving lives.
This is the first epidemic in the history of humankind where we are willing to sacrifice people at the altar of privacy. Just a few years ago, even some of the most sober-minded researchers wondered if the end of AIDS might be near. Perhaps the pills that miraculously changed HIV from a death sentence to a chronic infection would go the final step, they thought, eventually curing the infection by purging every trace of the virus from the human body. Such talk quickly faded. The new drug cocktails, amazing as they were, could not get rid of the virus.