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Political correctness threatens public health
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Recently, the Centers for Disease Control announced its recommendation that the entire population be regularly tested for AIDS.
The implications of this recommendation demonstrate the deleterious effect that political correctness has on logical, earnest and truthful inquiry.
The CDC has always been touted as the ultimate source for information and decision-making in public healthcare.
With their track record they seem invincible. Now they are calling for routine AIDS testing of everyone.
This is tantamount to throwing in the towel and admitting that their strategy to control the AIDS epidemic has been an utter failure.
The frequency of not only AIDS, but the whole panoply of sexually transmitted diseases is a catastrophic calamity on the level of global warming.
How did we get in such a state where we cannot even limit the spread of fragile diseases that cannot live outside the human body for more than a few seconds?
Despite the propaganda to the contrary, it hasn’t been for lack of money or concern.
Mortal disease, especially when spread by sexual contact or blood, gets everyone’s attention quickly.
Any sense of complacency was based upon physician-encouraged confidence in the medical establishment to do the right things to cure or contain the epidemic.
When AIDS was first recognized in the early 1980s it should have been treated in the same manner as any outbreak of a transmittable disease, but it wasn’t.
The standard public health model required the people with whom the patient had made contact of the type that could transmit the disease to be interviewed and – if necessary to controlling the spread of the disease – quarantined.
All through the prior years of the 20th century civil rights issues had been raised concerning the use of the public health model.
In every case the benefit to the public was determined to be paramount and the concerns were reasonably addressed; and it worked.
Why was this “silver bullet” plan not used? Because it wasn’t politically correct.
The CDC, in its official history of AIDS, cites political pressure from gay activists as a major factor in not utilizing the proven standard public health model.
As the administrator for the first AIDS clinic in the Pacific Northwest I know this to be true from my own professional involvement.
Political correctness then and to this day often precludes the use of best measures in disease control.
All human life is precious. The CDC – of all organizations – should have not been influenced by politics.
It should have led the charge for treating this awful syndrome of diseases the same as it did for other epidemic diseases.
Instead it gambled with the social engineering approach – and it lost. The CDC caved in to power politics. And now it’s officially admitted defeat.
What shame we bear to all those who have died and will continue to die of this and the other sexually transmitted diseases that have become not just epidemic, but endemic to
us now.
FREDERICK AREHART
