Aspirin And Bedrest Don’t Cure AIDS
Each minute around the world, approximately 6 people will die of AIDS. Despite this, a disturbingly large group of people deny the link between HIV and AIDS, meaning that they refuse life-saving antiretroviral drugs in favor of alternative therapies.
The consequences of AIDS denialism can be fatal, as seen last December when a California woman died of AIDS after refusing drugs that would probably have saved her life. Furthermore, her infant daughter had died several years earlier when the woman transmitted the virus to her daughter through breastfeeding, despite warnings not to do so. Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa and another AIDS denialist, indirectly caused an estimated 365,000 premature deaths when he prevented the administration of HIV treatments to citizens who were HIV positive. And more deaths will occur if AIDS denialism continues.
In light of this, how the heck do people refute the connection between AIDS and HIV? Quite easily actually, as there is plenty of “evidence” on the web backing them up…
Find out some of the eerie details, after the jump.
For example, denialists often cite a 1993 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention which found that just under 0.025 percent of the time HIV and AIDS weren’t linked. Come on people! At those odds, I think I would go with the assumption that HIV leads to AIDS rather than cross my fingers and hope for the best, doncha think? Yet celebrities such as the Foo Fighters continue to publicly deny the link. So do certain movements within the US, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Regnery Press, which attribute AIDS to lifestyle choices such as drug use, homosexuality, and an active sex life. So does Henry Bauer, a scientist at the forefront of the denialist movement whose previous area of expertise was proving the existence of the Loch Ness monster. And so do 1 in 4 Americans.
The last stat is the one that gets me. I couldn’t care less what a guy who still believes in monsters thinks, but I do care when a quarter of the people who take the train with me everyday don’t acknowledge, or realize, what a serious infliction HIV really is. Because if they don’t take HIV seriously, they probably don’t take HIV prevention seriously. And that worries me.
Whaddya say people? Time to rid ourselves of these outdated and harmful misconceptions once and for all?
[...] of the time we can’t afford it. But sometimes, like the AIDS denialism that Yolanda mentioned earlier today, we’re prone to the condition that as young people, we’re basically invincible.We can [...]