AIDS Day

I had an idea. I know, I know, thinking is dangerous, but applied some thought to the spread of HIV and AIDS and what can be done to stop it. There are times that one is confronted with a problem that just does not respond well to the technology that one brings to bear. It's times like those that one reaches back into the dusty corners of the mind to recall the old ways. I think that there is an old idea that would stop the spread of AIDS with near total effectiveness. It's old, it's simple, kinda scary, but it has worked marvelously before.

Quarantine.

I know that there a huge number of people suffering from AIDS, but that number is only growing, so the sooner the better on this. Setting up quarantines would not only stop the spread more or less instantly where implemented, but it would give doctors and pharmaceutical experts greater opportunities to search for a cure and it would allow treatment to applied to all, not just some.

Cuba had a great deal of success with their quarantine program, ended in 1993. The program was replaced with a less effective program that allowed AIDS patients to stay in their homes after being instructed how to care for themselves and how not to spread the disease. I ordinarily whould not look to Cuba as an example of anything, but it is an example of how a mass quarantine can be excuted and, though this should be obvious through deductive reasoning, that it works.

The African continent represents a greater challenge since there are few nations there with any sort of excuse for a productive economy and fewer still that are not so rife with corruption that nothing meaningful could be done, even if attempted by foreign agencies. I don't think there is much that can be done in the third world in general. About the best that can be done is to deploy doctors to specific locations, but that is already being done with no impact to the spread of AIDS, and least, no impact in much of the African continent. Places like Thailand are more advanced, but doing little better to contain the virus. A quaratine would work in places like Thailand and Mozambique, but it would not be pretty. My guess is that, like in Cuba, life in the quarantine would a living hell (much like life in Cuba at large, but anyway...). Further, it would probably take a military operation to put the neccessary people into quarantine and military operations in most of the underdeveloped world are usually catalysts for massive abuse and death.

Still, pull of a mass quranatine of anyone infected with AIDS would stop the spread like nothing else. Too bad nobody thought of this twenty years ago when there were only a few people infected... This outbreak was entirely preventable.

In the meantime, we are presented with such bandaind-where-a-tourniquet-is-needed solutions as condoms, as promoted by the giant condom on the Buenos Aires obelisk. Yeah right! I don't know how to enforce this, but people with incurable diseases should be having sex at all! You'd think that would be common sense.