Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Board of Health tentatively approved a plan that would add AIDS to the list of illnesses for which a Texan can be quarantined. The state commissioner can give approval for the isolation of someone with AIDS who refused to stop sexual activity or drug use that could spread the virus...
Wise wrote that it is "absurd to assume that carriers of the AIDS virus--some of whom are prostitutes--will unanimously refrain from having sex. The only feasible option we have right now is to identify AIDS carriers and take steps to isolate them...
Over a million people have come in contact with the virus. Wise does not seem to consider the ethics of essentially jailing a million people who have committed no crime, nor does he mention the Herculean task of testing the entire population for the antibody and forcefully containing those who test positively in certain areas. In addition, the only widespread test for the AIDS virus does not detect the virus itself, but antibodies to it. This test produces many false positives, which means that thousands of people who don't have the virus will test positively. Is Wise ready...
...Wise writes that "what people seem to have forgotten, though, is that AIDS victims are going to die, period." What Mr. Wise seems to have forgotten, or perhaps he never knew, is that not all who test positive for the HLTV-III virus will develop AIDS. Does he suggest that millions of Americans be in terned for 50 or 60 years? Perhaps all those people can be sent to Madagascar or Martha's Vineyard...
Information gathered on AIDS seems to indicate that it can be spread only by sexual contact and the exchange of body fluids. Yet it is absurd to assume that carriers of the AIDS virus--many of whom do not realize that they are carriers, and some of whom are prostitutes--will unanimously refrain from having sex. The only feasible option we have right now is to identify AIDS carriers and take steps to isolate them. Proposals of this kind go against the grain of what society deems decent, and so provoke a good deal of hubbub. What people seem...