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Indonesians Want To Microchip AIDS Patients
Lawmakers in Papua, Indonesia have thrown their support behind a bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips in order to better monitor the disease. In addition, legislator John Manangsang said by implanting chips in "sexually aggressive" patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and punish those who deliberately infect others. Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan. It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
A friend of mine once worked for a company that was making battery operated microarray testing units for the consumer market. Their plan was to sell them everywhere that condoms and pregnancy tests are sold. He claimed the unit could detect HIV/AIDS with 99% accuracy within just a few minutes. Apparently the USA, UK, Germany, Australia and France all banned the units before they even hit the market.. they were worried about discrimination against individuals with these diseases. They sell well in Africa and other countries, though only to doctors, and a positive result is always followed up with a lab test.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The trouble is, with some of these medical issues, that the ethical ways of dealing with the disease are slow, arduous, and sometimes just not effective, which makes the unethical ones a temptation. AIDS is a condition particularly likely to attract extreme schemes, by virtue of being incurable, fatal, and associated(even if often wrongly) by many with various sorts of degeneracy and sin. And this isn't just "oh those crazy primitive indonesians" stuff. Mike Huckabee wanted to quarantine all AIDS patients. Worse, of course, is the fact that it would work, so we have to rely on people's decency to keep them from doing seriously unethical stuff, and who wants to take that risk?
AIDS really isn't unique in this, although it is perhaps the most dramatic case. There are all sorts of diseases that we could attack if we were willing to do some dreadfully unethical things. For the moment, we've mostly resisted the urge; but the danger is always there, just waiting for a bit more stress on the system.
Prior to the 1950s an epidemic to the magnitude of AIDS would have had those infected with it quarantined and provided with free medical care. That is free drugs, and a clean sterile environment so they could live as pain-free as possible.
Today we let them go about their business and charge them extravagant rates for medications which is beyond the ability of many to pay.
Any other view would would be akin to a protecting a serial killer because you used to room with the guy and you're afraid of the social stigma.
Or we could just be protecting the witches, the anarchists, the commies, the blacks, the hippies, the Michael Bolton fans, and the AIDS patients because we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
The stigma associated with HIV/AIDS is so great in Indonesia that many people who are infected with the disease refuse to seek medical assistance because they are too ashamed - I know because I am Indonesian and have met such people.
What the Indonesian government needs to work on is to remove the stigma of HIV testing and the use of condoms and to educate people about the disease.
Threatening HIV positive people with a chip implant will achieve exactly the opposite and instead and will simply put HIV positive people into hiding and make it that much more difficult to educate these people about how the disease is transmitted - think about people who believe that having sex with virgins heals you of HIV or the South African minister who admitted to having sex with an HIV positive woman but took a shower afterwards to reduce chances of infection - these are the exact same people who need to be educated and not alienated
Here's a quick rundown:
1. Most people who have AIDS are actually Heterosexual.
Globally, that's true. The vast majority of AIDS transmission in the 3rd World is via heterosexual sex. 2nd world transmission is primarily hetrosexual sex and IV drug use. 1st World transmission is IV drug use and Homosexual sex, though Heterosexual transmission is rapidly rising, and should overtake Homosexual soon.
2. AIDS is incurable, there is no vaccine, and treatment is generally painful and only delays the inevitable.
True, true, and false. We have no cure for an HIV-infected individual, and there is no vaccine. However, not all HIV-positive people develop AIDS, and there are striking effective theraputic treatments these days (though they're still enormously expensive). Like many other chronic diseases, even with proper anti-HIV meds, HIV reduces your lifespan noticably (to perhaps half of what you would have post-infection). Drug regimes are not painful, and HIV-positive people generally can lead full lives up until the terminal phase of the disease.
3. No one who gets AIDS ever survives it. It has a 100% kill rate.
Not really true. AIDS actually never kills anyone. In and of itself, it doesn't kill. What is does is destroy the immune system, which allows opportunistic diseases to take hold (deadly diseases which normally healthy people can easily resist). Thus, AIDS indirectly kills the host. So you can't really say that AIDS is 100% fatal, since there are a large number of factors determining when/if you get some sort of opportunistic infection.
4. While there are homosexual people who have AIDS, Homosexuality and AIDS are unrelated. However, religious groups attempt to connect AIDS to Homosexuality, when there is none.
Homosexuality does NOT cause AIDS. However, unprotected homosexual sex (e.g. anal sex) has a much higher risk factor than oral or vaginal sex, so the transmission rate for male homosexuals is significantly higher than the lesbian and heterosexual population. Unfortunately, the uneducated (or purposely evil) folks make this correlation-to-causation connection, which is false.
5. If AIDS were transferable through some other common method, such as water, or mosquitoes, and a large majority of the population, if not the entire population of the Human species, we would be extinct within a matter of a few decades.
Possible, but irrelevant. There are many factors involved in the spread of any contagious disease, and I won't pretend to be an epidemiologist. But, if you are looking for a roughly comparable deadly disease, look at malaria. It is nasty, and has many of the long-term implications as does AIDS, yet the human population has survived with malaria for several millenia, at the least.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.