metamorphic

Warning signs and a missed opportunity
The Great Sexual Liberation of the 60’s and 70’s, gave birth to lifestyles that were unimaginable in previous generations in terms of scale and scope. Correspondingly, a health care system with an established proven method of diagnoses and treatments of previous decades, was utterly overwhelmed and unable to cope when ‘mysterious new’ diseases began cropping up during the second half of the 20th century. A typical health care clinic of 60’s and 70’s, had a family doctor who was quite familiar with their patient’s medical histories, and more importantly, a sacred trust with their patient’s personal lifestyle’s disclosures. But what happens when infected patients, especially of bisexuals, are reluctant to disclose their sexual activities and disease symptoms with their personal family physicians? In any pandemic outbreak, it is vital for local, state and federal health authorities to have the most accurate clinical reports available, and if they are skewed, the consequences can be disastrous for disease management and containment….especially when a virulent pathogen has a critical timeframe and period. There were a handful of frontline doctors in places like New York City, who reported the unusual severity of venereal disease symptoms, and saw firsthand its initial bizarre mutations and the absolute necessity of monitoring and tracking.
The historical perspective
Mirko Grmek, the French physician and medical historian explained in his book “History of AIDS” that AIDS “is not a disease in the old sense of the word, inasmuch as the virus is immunopathogenic, that it affects the immune system and produces symptoms only through the expedient of opportunistic infection or malignancy. In the past, a disease was defined either by clinical symptoms or by pathological lesions, which are morphological changes in organs, tissues, or cells. Nothing of the sort, neither clinical symptoms nor lesions, observable by the old means, characterizes AIDS.” What Doctor Grmek was is fact trying to say, was that AIDS is nothing new at the way and manner that biomedical researchers have coined it. Consequently, AIDS can be considered a medical novelty in as much as there are no existing criteria for it. Once patients are diagnosed with AIDS, they remain on the CDC lists if they are long term survivors.
Synergistic Co-factors
The inherent nature of HIV infection should be considered as an in the way of immune suppression rather than as a prime etiology. Most AIDS patients have a multiplicity of immune suppressive causes: cytomegalovirus, syphilis, herpes, and other stealth pathogen immunosuppressive agents just to name a few. In fact it has been strongly argued, that syphilis may even be a prime facilitating gateway for AIDS, and that HIV is just a symptomatic marker.
Time for another look.
The global unchecked pandemic of AIDS, its skyrocketing medical costs with still no effective cure in sight, demands that this epiphenomenon and its etiology be re-examined and redefined. Any novel and alien paradigm that is viewed and enjoyed with singular obsession, however widely popular it may be, must be held suspect, for true basic research can never flourish in an atmosphere of overspecialized rigidity, nor can it be constrained to the whims and dictates of the few, but rather it must thrive in conditions of freedom, that is open to all, and to the benefit of humanity in general.…