Dying of the Light

SINCE 1981, the experts tell us, some 441,528 Americans have been diagnosed with AIDS. Of these, it is said, about half have contracted the disease as a result of male homosexual coupling, and another quarter as a result of using contaminated needles for intravenous drug consumption. The rest are in one way or another simply victims of the above: people who have been given transfusions with infected blood, or women whose husbands have taken their secret extramarital pleasures with infected men, or babies born to AIDS-infected mothers. To be sure, in that same period the rates for heart disease and cancer have been much higher, but considering that AIDS has so far proved to be not only incurable but invariably fatal, the number of its sufferers has struck everyone as especially terrible.

An even more terrible number, however, is the 187,309 new cases reported for the years 1993 and 1994. For whereas the earliest AIDS patients knew nothing of their potential affliction until it was too late, by 1993 the means for avoiding infection were very widely known—indeed, in some places were even being taught to schoolchildren—and surely universally known to the country’s homosexual population. Thus it must be assumed that (with the exception of wives ignorant of what their husbands were doing on the sly and the doomed babies of criminally negligent mothers) the bulk of the most recently recorded cases have been contracted with foreknowledge of the dangers. Particularly in a society as health-obsessed and disease-conscious as our own, this most recent statistic fairly boggles the mind.

MD

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Midge Decter

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SINCE 1981, the experts tell us, some 441,528 Americans have been diagnosed with AIDS. Of these, it is said, about half have contracted the disease as a result of male homosexual coupling, and another quarter as a result of using contaminated needles for intravenous drug consumption. The rest are in one way or another simply victims of the above: people who have been given transfusions with infected blood, or women whose husbands have taken their secret extramarital pleasures with infected men, or babies born to AIDS-infected mothers. To be sure, in that same period the rates for heart disease and cancer have been much higher, but considering that AIDS has so far proved to be not only incurable but invariably fatal, the number of its sufferers has struck everyone as especially terrible.

An even more terrible number, however, is the 187,309 new cases reported for the years 1993 and 1994. For whereas the earliest AIDS patients knew nothing of their potential affliction until it was too late, by 1993 the means for avoiding infection were very widely known—indeed, in some places were even being taught to schoolchildren—and surely universally known to the country’s homosexual population. Thus it must be assumed that (with the exception of wives ignorant of what their husbands were doing on the sly and the doomed babies of criminally negligent mothers) the bulk of the most recently recorded cases have been contracted with foreknowledge of the dangers. Particularly in a society as health-obsessed and disease-conscious as our own, this most recent statistic fairly boggles the mind.