Bad Education

There's a disturbing rumor going around that a patient at a local hospital has just been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. They say the patient's only 27, and that he has no history of travel abroad. They say the guy seems straight (although with today's Muscle Mary standards, who really knows what the sexuality of a person is.)

Why is this disturbing? Maybe because this case doesn't fall into people's stereotypes of hapless saps who get infected with the virus - gay men, frequent travelers or sex workers. Maybe because this guy must have been infected when he was at least 22, which means, if he's sexually active, he's been screwing around without protection for the past five years. Maybe because, and this is probably what spurred me to write this piece, AIDS and sex education is breaking down, and isn't doing what it's supposed to.

Come to think of it, the furor surrounding AIDS has died down a bit. Not too much movies, no noteworthy books, not much discussion or 'healthy' debate going on. At least, not as sensational as in the early 80s, when everything was shrouded in fear and the mere mention of the word gave shivers down the spine.

Do you remember the 90s? That decade brought AIDS Walk and Gay Men's Health Crisis, the Library Foundation, and Pink Triangle. You had Greg Louganis and Magic Johnson hogging the sports pages. Scientists were disputing as to who really discovered the virus, while journalists were debating the identity of patient-x, the original ground zero for infection. (Do I sound nostalgic? Geez, I hope not)

Now, who gets to hear news now about the AIDS quilt? After Tom Hanks won a Best Actor award for Philadelphia, what came after? Does the Broadway musicale 'Rent' resonate with the same emotional force as when it premiered?

With the advent of the cocktail drug therapy, where all the retroviral drugs were dumped together and thrown in the face of the virus, which then allowed people to live longer than they should have (although not necessarily cure them), it seemed things went pretty quiet. Not too many people dying. Not much fear to be felt from the activists. Not much activism, if you ask me.

Where are the gay men holding kiss-ins in the middle of church services? What gets front page attention nowadays is a churchgoer getting irate at a priest for lecturing about politics, and walking out. But AIDS? It's usually a crummy little piece stuck in the middle of the community health pages, with little or no depth.

The news from abroad is that an increase has been seen in infection rates in young kids. And why is this? Because apparently, today's school kids aren't exposed to the same information as their counterparts got force fed with five, ten years ago. People are forgetting, and that's what's really worrying.

Is this a case in point? Did this kid end up with not just HIV, but full blown AIDS, because he wasn't equipped with the necessary information? Because he didn't know how to use protection? Or did he feel he wasn't at risk, because like most straight men, he thought "it's a gay disease"? Is this a case of the city, province, or country not doing enough about the disease?

To be sure, this country has enough health concerns without having to add AIDS to it. There's dengue, bird flu, the foot and mouth disease and mad cow diseases to contend with - and those are just the epidemics we're at risk for from the animals. As for those you get from other people, let's not even go there.

But really, maybe now is the time to sit up and take notice, to activate those old programs for intervention and information, to blare the information from loud speakers, and demonstrate condom use with an eggplant. Maybe it's time to again start wearing red ribbons and distributing condoms, and pick the same old fight with conservatives who believe that condoms promote promiscuity. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to start saving lives again.

As they used to say, silence equals death.