AIDS and Historical Perspective

One of the news items that recently caught my attention was the AIDS 2002 conference held in Barcelona. I'm pretty cynical about such conferences. They are mainly held so that people can look like they are doing something about a problem, while in fact not doing anything at all. The dollars spent on such conferences would almost certainly be better off spent directly on the problem.

I'm old enough to remember a time before AIDS was a word. If people worried about sexually transmitted diseases, they worried about syphilis, herpes or gonorrhea. Then AIDS came along and changed everything. At first it was called the "gay plague" and some religious groups saw it as divine retribution. While there are still people that hold such beliefs, only bigots and idiots would say so publicly. We have a better understanding of the disease now, but still don't have a cure.

I specifically remember one news clip featuring a delegate saying that AIDS was the worst disease threat that humanity has ever faced. That delegate needs some historical perspective. In 1918-19 the Spanish Flu killed between 30 and 40 million people world wide. About 675,000 people died in the United States alone. The population of the United States then was about 103,000,000. It killed more people than the Great War, and more than during the worst years of the Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Between a quarter and half the people in the world caught some form of it. Some of these people died within hours of contracting the flu. Here's some comparison data between the various 20th century flu epidemics. The base for the flu still lives within aquatic birds, and the virus can mutate and infect humans.

According to the Centre for Disease Control, as of December 2000 there are about 337,000 people living with AIDS in the United States, and about 40,000 people a year get the disease. Just over 16,000 people died of the disease in 2000. UNAIDS estimate says that in the United States there are 900,000 people living with AIDS in 2001. That's almost 3 times the CDC number. Just for comparison, about 40,000 people die every year in motor vehicle crashes, and 725,000 people died of heart disease in 1999.

UNAIDS says that globally in 2001, 40 million people are living with AIDS, that 5 million caught the disease, and that 3 million people died of the disease. Lets assume those figures are accurate, though I suspect that the numbers are very fuzzy indeed. It's taken 20 years for 40 million people to have the disease now. It appears that about 25 million people have died of AIDS since it started.

Compared to Spanish Flu, AIDS is a terribly slow killer. That's both good and bad. Good in the sense that the afflicted could live with the disease for 10 years or more, and that they might live long enough for scientists to come up with a more effective drug treatment. It's bad in that it takes away the urgency of finding a solution, and gives the afflicted time to infect more people.

AIDS is a hard disease to catch compared to the flu. One person with the flu sneezing in a subway car could infect hundreds of people, and a significant number of them would be dead in a few hours. Prevent the exchange of bodily fluids, and you essentially prevent the spread of AIDS.

AIDS is a disease of ignorance. National pride, political corruption, and religious stupidity seem to be the main barriers to overcome. Money isn't, or shouldn't be a problem. The government of Canada wastes enough money every year to make a major difference in preventing the spread of AIDS. That and more is a rounding error to the United States. As long as the governments of the most afflicted countries choose to spend what little resources they have on guns, rather than medicine or education for their people, it's easy for the developed world to figure they aren't serious about a solution and continue to ignore the problem. This indifference, and having nothing left to lose, is a breeding ground for terrorism. You'd think the developed world would see education and disease prevention in the third world as a form of self defense; one much cheaper than building aircraft carriers.