GibberishJune 5, 2006 5:33 pm
I’ll Take Batman’s Psychoses Any Day of the Week
We have all had the same sinking feeling about the Man of Steel.
(Hat Tip: Bakie)
A Day of Mourning, Prayers for Hope
Today HIV/AIDS turns 25.
From a story in today’s New York Times:
On June 5, 1981, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brief note was taken of a peculiar cluster of pneumonia cases in five otherwise healthy gay men.The item was the first official mention of a scourge that had no name, no known means of transmission, no treatment and no cure.
AIDS, as it would eventually be called, was already spreading fear in America’s gay enclaves, where before long half the young men who came of age at the dawn of the gay liberation movement would be infected, stigmatized, ravaged by rare infections and cancers, and die. It soon reached into neighborhoods already burdened by poverty and drug abuse.
For years after that federal report, one of the few certainties was that this disease, to quote other reports, was “invariably fatal.” The United Nations estimates that today, H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, has infected more than 65 million people, 25 million of whom have died.
