Social Diseases

I've been reading a couple of articles (one from Reuters, the other from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) about how the fight against HIV and AIDS is moving to the Black community in the United States. Both take pains to bring to light the fact that Blacks are very much over-represented in the ranks of the HIV-positive. I know that it sounds morbid, but I wish that the articles had also given the raw numbers, rather than just the percentages. The fact that 50 percent of new HIV cases in 2003 were diagnosed in Blacks sounds really alarming. But is that out of a grand total of 5,000 cases nationwide, 500 cases or 50,000 cases? And are those numbers going up or down?

Both articles cite the social obstacles that have to cleared in order to reduce the spread of the disease. But the Reuters article goes a little further, and summons up the ghosts of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and quotes a man saying: "My first question was 'Wait, are you going to inject me with the HIV virus?'" But if you only know the basics about how vaccines work, this is a perfectly logical question, fears of racism or none. I seem to remember being taught that anti-viral vaccines work somrthing like this:

1) Kill or severely weaken a virus.
2) Inject the crippled virus into a person.
3) Person's immune system uses the crippled virus as target practice.
4) Person's immune system is ready for the real thing, should it ever appear.

Of course, sometimes the virus isn't as crippled is you thought it was, and someone contracts the disease for real. And when you're dealing with something that can kill you (or, make it easier for something else to kill you), that's a very real concern.

In any event, it doesn't take concerns about past injustices to be concerned about a vaccine trial that's testing a countermeasure for a disease that many people still regard as unfailingly lethal. I don't know if it's ironic or not, but it seems to me that perhaps the most enduring legacies of racism in the United States has the expectation of racism. Blacks are expected to be suspicious of Whites' intentions, almost for it's own sake, and Whites are expected to prepared for and understanding of that very suspicion. Steven Barnes (the science fiction author), in an NPR commentary, "argues that one of the reasons Sen. Barack Obama could be such an appealing candidate is that he doesn't carry the cultural baggage of slavery, since his father was an immigrant to the United States." But I would submit that the rest of us don't need to carry that baggage either. Just because our parents and grandparents taught us to lug it around doesn't mean that it's good for us. Maybe it's past time we just dumped it by the curb and went on.