The Epidemic and the War

When San Francisco was struck by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in October 1989, the American public, the governments of California and the United States, and the international media devoted weeks of attention to the rescue stories and recovery efforts. Congress arranged for speedy economic help to the Bay Area, and insurance companies took out full page ads for many days running to facilitate any claims their customers needed to file. The Vice-President came to survey the tragedy, to express his deep concern and that of the President as well.

For those San Franciscans who had already endured eight years of lives lost to the AIDS epidemic, the intensity of the response to the earthquake evoked mixed emotions. No Vice-President ever visited the injured in San Francisco General's AIDS ward. Instead, the White House seldom mentioned AIDS in the ten years of the epidemic.

No insurance company ever placed eloquent ads in city dailies offering to assist with the payment for HIV treatments. In contrast, many insurers have gone to some trouble to back out of coverage for legitimate treatments. In the first issue published after the earthquake, AIDS TREATMENT NEWS commented that "in two days, national institutions mobilized as they have never done in eight years of AIDS," and that outside of communities immediately affected by the epidemic, there had not been "even a pale shadow of the mobilization that the far less deadly earthquake has called forth."

Now, much of the world is traumatized by a new disaster: the war in the Middle East, which is commanding the attention and the assets of many nations, their citizens and their news media. Every day, headlines convey the war's urgency, economic futures are reassessed, and the greatest political gravity is assigned to the crisis.

And once more, people who have been struggling with chronic disasters in their lives and their communities are faced with discrepancies in their government's priorities. One week after the resort to warfare, the death toll from AIDS in the U. S. passed 100,000. AIDS has killed more San Franciscans in a decade than have died in the past century of wars and earthquakes combined. The day after bombings against Iraq began, San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, "The war we wanted was a war against AIDS, homelessness and poverty." In the United States today, AIDS is the second leading cause of death of men ages 25 to 44. Who will decide that the vast human resources now poured into technology for ending life can be used instead to build technology for preserving life?

Besides diverting attention from the AIDS crisis, the war has impeded research and care due to staff shortages, as medical professionals are sent to the Gulf. Long-term financial impacts on medical research are not yet known, but almost certainly they will be severe. Clearly the war will do no good for AIDS or any other medical research and care; the question is what damage will be done and how much. We plan to report as necessary on these consequences of the Gulf War, but not to let it divert our attention from the war against AIDS.

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