SLSL Intro, See no evil....

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>From Nicholas Eberstadt's lead article in the current edition of "Foreign 
Affairs"      

       HIV/AIDS is a disease at once amazingly virulent and shockingly 
       new. Only a generation ago, it lay undetected. Yet in the past two 
       decades, by the reckoning of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS
       (UNAIDS), about 65 million people have contracted the illness, and 
       perhaps 25 million of them have already died. The affliction is almost 

       invariably lethal: scientists do not consider a cure to be even on the 

       horizon. For now, it looks as if AIDS could end up as the coming 
       century's top infectious killer. 
    
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20021101faessay9990/nicholas-eberstadt/the-futur

e-of-aids.html

cf

"For Reagan, AIDS presented a number of potentially serious 
political risks. As a presidential candidate, Reagan promised 
to eliminate the role of the federal government in the limited 
American welfare state, as well as to raise questions of morality 
and family in social policy. When AIDS was first reported in 
1981, Reagan had recently assumed office and had begun to 
address the conservative agenda by slashing social programs 
and cutting taxes and by embracing conservative moral principles. 
As a result, Reagan never mentioned AIDS publicly until 1987. 
Most observers contend that AIDS research and public education 
were not funded adequately in the early years of the epidemic, at 
a time when research and public education could have saved lives. 

In the early 1980s, senior officials from the Department of Health 
and Human Services pleaded for additional funding behind the 
scenes while they maintained publicly, for political reasons, that 
they had enough resources. The Reagan administration treated 
AIDS as a series of state and local problems rather than as a 
national problem. This helped to fragment the limited governmental 
response early in the AIDS epidemic. 


AIDS could not have struck at a worse time politically. With 
the election of Reagan in 1980, the "New Right" in American 
politics ascended. Many of those who assumed power embraced 
political and personal beliefs hostile to gay men and lesbians. 
Health officials, failing to educate about transmission and risk 
behavior, undermined any chance of an accurate public 
understanding of AIDS. The new conservatism also engendered 
hostility toward thosewith AIDS. People with AIDS (PWAs) were 
scapegoated and stigmatized. It was widely reported, as well, that 
New Right groups, such as the Moral Majority, successfully 
prevented funding for AIDS education programs and counseling 
services for PWAs. At various points in the epidemic, conservatives 
called for the quarantining and tattooing of PWAs. Jerry Falwell, 
the leader of the Moral Majority, was quoted as stating: "AIDS is 
the wrath of God upon homosexuals." 

This larger conservative climate enabled the Reagan administration's 
indifference toward AIDS. The administration undercut federal efforts 
to confront AIDS in a meaningful way by refusing to spend the 
money Congress allocated for AIDS research. In the critical years 
of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House physician, Reagan 
thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and it would go away." 
Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon claims that the president's response 
to AIDS was "halting and ineffective." It took Rock Hudson's death 
from AIDS in 1985 to prompt Reagan to change his personal views, 
although members of his administration were still openly hostile to 
more aggressive government funding of research and public education. 

Six years after the onset of the epidemic, Reagan finally mentioned 
the word "AIDS" publicly at the Third International AIDS Conference held in 
Washington, D.C. 

Reagan's only concrete proposal at this time was widespread 
routine testing. Reagan and his close political advisers also 
successfully prevented his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, 
from discussing AIDS publicly until Reagan's second term. 
Congress mandates that the surgeon general's chief responsibility 
is to promote the health of the American people and to inform 
the public about the prevention of disease. In the Reagan 
administration, however, the surgeon general's central role 
was to promote the administration's conservative social agenda, 
especially pro-life and family issues. 

At a time when the surgeon general could have played an 
invaluable role in public health education, Koop was prevented 
from even addressing AIDS publicly. Then, in February 1986, 
Reagan asked Koop to write a report on the AIDS epidemic. 
Koop had come to the attention of conservatives in the Reagan 
administration because of his leading role in the anti-abortion 
movement. Reagan administration officials fully expected Koop 
to embrace conservative principles in his report on AIDS."

http://www.thebody.com/encyclo/presidency.html

respectfully



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