HIV and I have had a relatively civil union these past twelve years. For eight of those years, I was on heavy-duty anti-HIV medication; three years ago, I decided to take a break from the meds, as their side-effects were taking a toll and I had unconsciously begun to miss some dosages. Amazingly, the virus never really bounded back, and my immune system maintained a very stable balance. (For the initiated, my viral load bobbed between 15,000 and 40,000 viral particles per milliliter of blood; and my CD4 cell count stayed in the 500 – 600 range. People without HIV have a count between 500 and 1500, with the majority around 1000. But you only get AIDS if you dip below 200). Until now, that is. My latest numbers show an all-time low for my immune system, 380 CD4 count, and an all-time high for the virus, clocking in at 140,000. It’s one data point, and I’ll get another before I go back on meds. But it seems to me that after three years, the virus has broken back out of its no-fly zone. Not too surprising.
THE CHANGING CLIMATE: But a couple of things struck me talking this through with my doc. First off, my new med regimen may well amount to a mere two pills once a day. Just two pills. By this fall, the drug companies will have simplified the regimen to one pill once a day. The side-effects are predicted to be minimal (I’ll keep you posted). Compared with what we pozzies were taking in the mid-1990s, this is an astonishing improvement. I was once taking up to 40 pills a day with crippling side effects. The broader point: Yet another disincentive to getting HIV has evaporated. How are you supposed to scare people when the treatment is this simple, this effective and this easy? Compare the kind of medical ramifications of testing positive for Type 2 diabetes with testing positive for HIV. Your life is not as definitively shortened with HIV as it is with diabetes; the treatment is far less onerous; the lifestyle changes are fewer, compared with daily injections, monitoring your diet, and so on. All of this poses a big challenge to those trying to craft safer sex messages. When the costs of infection are this low and the sexual benefits as immediate and attractive as they always are, the current strategy of scaring people to death won’t work. We have to find a better, more positive way to encourage safer sex.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The ends never justify the means, because even if we do win in a fit of religious righteousness, ‘it will be a Pyrhhic victory.’ It will fundamentally tear away the wonderful secular and democratic protections the founders designed. As observers like Gary Hart have noted, the moral superiority of our ideals and values – the ‘fourth power’ as he calls it – is what will be the decisive factor in this war against Islamic fundamentalism. That power is the belief that all humanity, regardless of their allegiance to a particular God or any god, deserves basic and elemental protections because one’s own freedom and ability to believe in anything is not derived from the divine, but from the natural.
One of the reasons why I believe fascism fell without much of an attempt to rise again is that at Nuremberg the ethos was clear: even though your crimes are among the most vile ever recorded, you will be afforded a transparent process through which we will try your actions. This offered no legitimacy to the ideology of the Third Reich, but instead made a powerful statement to the rest of the world that even a systematic campaign to exterminate a group of people could not undermine the idea of justice.
And yet, what I am struck by the conception of justice borne out by Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and the logic of Yoo, Gonzales, and all the rest, is that our idea of justice ipso facto has been undermined. We are so fearful of legitimizing the ideology of al Qaeda, and in some way feel they have escaped the throws of humanity itself, that all of this is justified in so far as it all contributes to the “big war” against terror.
For my part, I’m not so sure. I think you have it exactly right. Osama and al-Zawahiri want this, precisely, because they cannot have a morally superior enemy, just as Hamas cannot accept the idea of a decent Israeli citizen. We, and they, are all pigs. It isn’t true of course, but exactly how do we make that case in the Middle East when this idea of justice has been taken to mean that the US can apprehend anyone, anywhere and then do anything with them without any due process or judicial oversight? How do we even make that case at home?
It all plays out like some Faustian tragedy.”
The Dish 