Wrap Your Tool Part 3

By 1983, HIV was still not a household word, but it was at the very least fairly well known in the medical research field.  As the virus spread rapidly amongst the American gay community, eventually evolving into a worldwide epidemic, doctors in France were beginning to notice a similar disease sprouting up amongst migrant workers from Africa.  It wasn’t the first time the virus had appeared in Europe, having been brought back by Europeans working in Africa, but these cases were fairly limited and it had never before appeared in noticeable clusters.  After confirming that the virus was the same as the one in the United States, which involved a whole lot of pointless scientific bickering between the U.S. and French labs, questions began to be asked of what in the hell might be going on down in Africa.

While HIV slowly made its way across the Atlantic to Haiti and then the United States over a period of a decade, it spread much faster across first central, and then all of Sub-Saharan Africa.  Zaire was the first country to have an outbreak of considerable size, though its existence was largely hidden by a lack knowledge about it, though identifiable by a surge in opportunistic infections such as pneumonia, meningitis, and tuberculosis.  However, given that these diseases were already endemic on the continent, and that the political situation in the region was rarely stable, such warning signs were mostly ignored.  As a result, when researchers finally turned their attention to what was going on in Africa by the mid-1980’s, the virus was already widespread in nearly every country on the continent.

The rapid spread of HIV across the African continent was due to several key factors, one major one being economic growth.  Throughout the 1970’s, one of the primary vectors for spreading the disease was via the significant network of truck drivers moving across the continent and the prostitutes which saw to their personal needs.  These truck drivers then brought the disease home to their families where it was spread further.  As Africa began to shake off its post-colonial economic malaise, this vector only increased, with countless men migrating to cities to find work to support their families left home in the rural villages, which in turn unsurprisingly led to an even higher demand for prostitutes.

When western aid workers first began fighting the spread of HIV in Africa in the late 1980’s, these were the main areas of focus, resulting in massive efforts to get hookers and truck drivers to use condoms.  Unfortunately, these efforts did exactly jack shit due to the aid workers refusing to acknowledge local cultural norms regarding the acceptability of polyamorous relationships for both African men and women.  Thanks to long-term sexual contact being more likely to spread the virus and nearly everyone having multiple regular sexual partners, HIV just went gang busters.  A situation that was little helped by many African governments flat out refusing to even acknowledge the spread of the virus in their countries, referring to it as that gay disease from America.

It wasn’t until the late-1990’s that aid workers and African governments finally pulled their heads out of their asses enough to start actually taking on the problem.  By then, millions had already caught the disease and died, including hundreds of thousands of cases of mothers giving it to their unborn babies.  In many countries, 10 percent or more of the population became infected, HIV became the number one cause of death, and life expectancy began to fall drastically.  By 2011, some 35 million Africans were infected, and over 15 million had died.  Though aid workers and African governments had shifted to strategies centered on educating the wider public, gains were limited by social stigmas surrounding the virus, a refusal by many to change cultural norms, and a lack of funding.

In 1996, researchers developed a cocktail of retrovirus drugs which proved effective at treating HIV, which resulted in an almost immediate sharp drop in deaths and new infections across the developed world.  However, the drugs’ use in Africa was severely limited due to the region’s widespread poverty, the expense of the drugs, and the scope of the outbreak.  As a result, HIV continued to spread, until finally a U.S. president said enough was enough.  That president was George W. Bush.  In 2003, Georgie-Boy pushed through an $80 billion relief package through Congress, the largest aid package in history targeting a single disease, which made the retrovirus cocktail widely available throughout Africa.  Today it is estimated that this package directly saved the lives of some 7 million people and prevented god only knows how many new infections.  Today, HIV continues to kill 770,000 people worldwide each year, but this is down drastically from the 2 million per year just fifteen years before.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aids_is_commons_in_Africa.jpeg

Wrap Your Tool Part 2

In 1971, a Haitian immigrant arrived in New York City full of dreams of a better life.  Unfortunately, they didn’t get a better life, nor did many that they came in contact with.  This unlucky Haitian was patient zero for the HIV epidemic in the United States, along with many other parts of the world.  Little to nothing is known about this person, other than they must have been down on their luck.  The first population to be affected were homeless junkies, spreading the virus via sharing needles.  By the mid-1970’s, a number of homeless people began dying of a sudden onset of a type of pneumonia commonly seen in those with weak immune systems.  So many died that people who worked with that population began calling it junkie pneumonia.  However, similar to the cases already taking place in Africa and Haiti, nobody with the power to do so gave enough of a shit about homeless people to look into it.  By 1976, similar cases began appearing amongst the homeless population of San Francisco.  It was there that HIV began to affect a different population, and first appear in the public eye.

In 1969, a police raid on a gay bar in New York City, known as the Stonewall Inn, broke out into a three day riot, breathing new life into the gay civil rights movement.  Utilizing similar tactics as the African-American Civil Rights movement, the gay community began battering down barriers.  Over the next decade, nineteen states decriminalized same-sex relations, psychiatrists quit viewing homosexuality as a mental disorder, and many people began to not only openly declare their sexuality, but to celebrate it.  Seeking places where they could openly be themselves, many migrated to major west coast cities, the most prominent being San Francisco.  There, many created a culture that critics called hedonistic, filled with celebration and casual promiscuity, the center of which were the bathhouses, where people could meet anonymous partners.

Amongst those making the journey to San Francisco and similar cities, many were cut off by families and lacking the means to support themselves.  Intermingling with both the gay and homeless communities, they became the bridge for HIV.  Between the large amount of casual sex and the high transmission rates of anal intercourse, the virus spread rapidly, leaping from city to city, carried by businessmen and flight attendants.  By 1981, the disease had spread enough to start catching the notice of the Centers for Disease Control, which noted strange clusters of deaths by pneumonia.  Over the next eighteen months, new clusters were discovered across the nation, with people dying of diseases and infections that shouldn’t be afflicting otherwise healthy individuals.  At first it was only noticed in gay men, earning monikers like the gay disease, but soon after its prevalence was also noted amongst junkies, hemophiliacs, and Haitian immigrants.  Thousands began to sicken and die.

In the world of the 1980’s, though progress had been made, the gay community and anything to do with it was still stigmatized by the majority of Americans.  Due to this stigmatization, the spread of HIV was largely ignored by the government, the media, and the public.  In the early days, little to nothing was known about HIV, nobody knew how it spread, so many doctors and nurses refused to treat HIV patients.  Even as the disease spread, many medical professionals refused to acknowledge that the virus could be contracted by the heterosexual community.  Despite people dying every day, few resources and little funding was put towards research, a problem only exacerbated by infighting amongst researchers more interested in their own fame than collaboratively working together.  The virus wasn’t identified until 1983, and a broadly available test didn’t become available until 1985.  Politicians refused to even mention the disease, with President Reagan not even mentioning it until 1987.  This abject refusal to even acknowledge the virus, led to HIV getting into blood banks, spreading the disease further.  The media furthered the chaos by printing rumors that led to cases of mass hysteria.

In the end, it took members of the gay community, and their supporters and families, to forcefully thrust the issue into the public eye.  Famed actor Rock Hudson died from the virus in 1985, and was followed by several other prominent celebrities, such as Freddy Mercury.  However, it wasn’t until babies and women began to die in more significant numbers that the public began taking the issue seriously.  Unfortunately, homophobia wasn’t the only thing activists had to fight.  Members of the gay community pushed back as well, especially against calls to limit sexual partners and to close the bathhouses, decrying the demands as doomsday projections.  These same activists also raised money to fill the gaps in funding for research and medical care for those getting sick.

Deaths caused by HIV in the U.S. continued to rise throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s, finally peaking in 1995 at 42,000 deaths per year.  The following year, researchers developed a cocktail of antiviral drugs which reduced death rates by 60 percent in two years.  Today, fewer than 17,000 die each year of the disease, which is widely viewed as treatable.  Some 1.1 million Americans live with HIV, 14% of whom are estimated to be unaware of it.  An estimated 700,000 people in the U.S. have died of HIV infections since the beginning of the epidemic.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pelosi_at_Second_National_March_in_1987.jpg

Wrap Your Tool Part 1

At the turn of the twentieth century, the at the time well accepted Malthusian theory that civilization was inevitably going to collapse due to rapidly growing populations, resulted in the great European powers scrambling to seize control of Africa and its sweet sweet resources.  Yes, this is something that is just going to keep coming up again and again.  Anyways, the whole process pretty much upended the traditional way of life of many African societies.  After all, establishing mines, railroads, and plantations took a lot of labor, and you can probably bet who ended up doing most of it whether they wanted to or not.  As a result of this sudden fervor to build things, large camps formed, mostly of men, which of course in turn attracted in women willing to sell a certain commodity, which of course led to rampant STD outbreaks.  It also led to a significant demand for meat, which outstripped local domesticated supplies to the point that bushmeat hunting became a lucrative industry, bushmeat being pretty much any animal one was able to shoot.

Well, it’s hard to say exactly what happened next, but the basic working theory is that these bushmeat hunters continually came into contact with the blood of primates to the point that eventually some chimp disease made the jump over to people in the Congo River basin.  This brand new disease then made its way from camp to camp up and down the river system, spread via prostitutes and those who enjoyed their services.  You can probably guess the name of this little wonder by now, but I’m going to say it anyways.  We’re talking about fricking HIV.  Anyways, for the next several decades HIV remained a fairly secluded little virus, killing off the occasional prostitute and cheap laborer, which the powers that be didn’t give a shit about, and mostly staying under the radar since people didn’t die of HIV, but rather other diseases that walked in the open door after HIV killed off its host’s immune system.

Overall, HIV was a rather local affair, just one of countless unknown tropical diseases killing off a few hundred people here and there.  However, that began to rapidly change in the 1960’s when the old European powers, exceedingly short on cash, began the process of decolonization, by which I mean they pretty much jumped ship, flipping off their former colonies as they went.  Fueled by Cold War politics and the fact that the gobbledy-gook of new countries had borders that had nothing to do with the people actually living within them, large parts of Africa descended into a chaotic mess of dictators, coups, and just in general shittiness.  Amongst the casualties of this period was the healthcare infrastructure of many nations, including widespread immunization and antibiotic programs.  As a result, STD’s like syphilis became more rampant, leading to HIV beginning to become more widespread for reasons best explained by just saying genital sores and leaving it at that.

Here’s a fun thing about political and socio-economic chaos.  It tends to get people moving around a lot.  Here’s another fun thing, it really doesn’t result in people having any less sex.  As the 1960’s turned into the 1970’s, HIV slowly but surely spread across central Africa, mostly amongst the poor urban working class, where it largely went unnoticed, again, due to the virus itself not actually killing people and nobody in any position of power really giving a shit what specific thing was killing a bunch of poor people in third world countries at a time when so many different things were killing them anyways.  What aid African countries did get from the two battling behemoths that were the U.S. and the Soviet Union mostly revolved around propping up or overthrowing tin pot dictators who supported one side or the other, and not actually, you know, making things better.  After all, why should either super power really give a damn about something that wasn’t really their problem?

Well, that all changed when the crazy dictator of Haiti, a man lovingly called Papa Doc, kicked up his crazy to another notch and started killing off all the intellectual types in his country in the 1960’s.  Not really being down with such things, most of the aforementioned intellectuals fled the country, many migrating to central Africa where there was a high demand for teachers who could speak French.  While working as teachers, some of these Haitians contracted HIV, which they then brought back home to Haiti with them around 1967.  This sparked a small epidemic in the country, which similar to what was happening in Africa, went largely unnoticed due to Papa Doc being a crazy son of a bitch and nobody giving a shit if poor people were finding a new novel way to die.  Of course, the poor people themselves weren’t all that down with it, which is probably why a number of them immigrated to the United States during this period, one of whom brought along a little extra passenger.  And that my friends, is how HIV founds its way to the United States.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Activist_Phyllis_Schafly_wearing_a_%22Stop_ERA%22_badge,_demonstrating_with_other_women_against_the_Equal_Rights_Amendment_in_front_of_the_White_House,_Washington,_D.C._(42219314092).jpg