From "Anybody Can Get It?" by Janice Shaw Crouse, posted 10/17/07 at Concerned Women for America
...There is an obvious missing piece in both instances. You’re not going to die from a stingray’s barb unless you dive in waters that are home to stingrays. Likewise, unless you (1) Have intimate sexual contact with someone who is infected with the HIV/AIDS virus, (2) Share contaminated needles to do drugs, or (3) Are a healthcare worker who comes in direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person (or as in the heartrending case of Kimberly Bergalis, who contracted AIDS from her infected dentist), you will not, I repeat, you will NOT contract HIV/AIDS.
Another phony slogan foisted off on the public is that women are the “new face of HIV/AIDS.” These myths are among the pernicious efforts to disperse the stigma associated with a disease that is almost exclusively a homosexual male and drug addict epidemic. Insidious myths like these leave today’s young people misinformed, misled and, thus, unprotected.
In fact, Unprotected is the title of an important book that every parent of teenage children needs to read. It exposes the political correctness that leaves college students especially vulnerable to a whole range of health and emotional problems. The author, Miriam Grossman, M.D., is a psychiatrist who has worked for two decades with college students and served during the past decade at the student health center at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Others have commented on various aspects of Dr. Grossman’s exposé of the biases that harm students at university student health centers. I was especially appalled that basic medical knowledge about the transmission of the HIV/AIDS virus is kept from students. In spite of the fact that we are now well past the quarter century mark in the AIDS epidemic, and in spite of the fact that 1 in every 500 college students may be HIV positive, basic HIV/AIDS information is not known by the general public; our students in particular, the very ones most in need of truth to reinforce self-discipline, are not fully informed about the facts.
We treat HIV/AIDS differently from any other public health threat. While doctors are required by law to report nearly 50 communicable diseases (including tuberculosis, measles, syphilis, meningitis), and people with those communicable diseases are ordered by law to get treatment or go to jail, United States laws prohibit disclosure of anyone’s HIV status. Even the HIV tests use a code name to avoid identifying any infected persons. Thus, the only way anyone knows that a person has the virus is if that information is voluntarily given.
Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that in the United States there are 40,000 new HIV cases per year and about 900,000 people living with the disease, with nearly 250,000 of those people unaware that they are infected. In response, the CDC recommends that the public be non-judgmental and they identify racism, discrimination, stigma and homophobia as reasons for the spread of the epidemic! As Dr. Grossman points out, instead of the public health programs which successfully controlled cholera, polio and syphilis, we fight the AIDS epidemic, a disease that has already claimed a half million victims in the U.S., with programs about cultural sensitivity. Such is the power of homosexual activists who waged a “privacy” campaign and, as noted by Dr. Grossman, won special status for HIV/AIDS among infectious diseases: voluntary and anonymous testing and no partner notification.
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