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From: ST701852%BROWNVM.BITNET@oac.ucla.edu (Carole Mah)
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: (2737) Trivializing AIDS
Message-ID: <1990Nov16.055755.5315@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: 15 Nov 90 19:59:59 GMT
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It seems to me that you are right -- we must not trivialize this
disease.  You mentioned that you are going to live LONGER but that that
does not mean a LONG LIFE, and that every time some researcher comes up
with something new in a test tube, this does not necessarily mean sh*t
to you.  This brings up another point for us to keep in mind:

The theme for World AIDS day this year is WOMEN.  Very little of the
research on AIDS that has been done means sh*t to WOMEN.  The CDC's
official definition of what OID's are AIDS-related do not include ones
that only women get; I understand one's OIDs must be on this list to
receive any kind of assistance from the gonvernment. So that a poor
black woman in the inner city is likely to die faster than an white
middle-class man.  I have also read that the OID's that affect women
are much faster-acting diseases than ones that affect men (esp.
Kaposi's Sarcoma), so that this, too, contributes to a shorter life
for women with AIDS.

     Also, most of the statistics out on women and AIDS relate to
their passing it on to their children; this is the focus especiallly
in the media (not that it isn't tragic that so many children have
AIDS).  It just seems insane to me that women are so often seen not
as human beings in their own right, to be worried about and helped
on their own account, but rather only baby-machines; what seems to
matter to many researchers is not that so many women are dying of AIDS,
but only that they are passing it on to their children.