This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Once the stable virus is found, it may be possible to produce a vaccine. In any case, the answer will probably not come out of the laboratory, but from the field.
7 July 1988
To Editor of London Review of Books
Chatwin quotes John Ryle's 1988 review of "(1) And the Band Played On, (2) Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of Aids, and (3) The Forbidden Zone:
Ryle: There is no good news about Aids. With a total of 85,000 cases reported at the beginning of this year the World Health Organization estimate of the true figure is nearer 150,000. Their global estimate for HIV infection is between 5 and 10 million. Most HIV-positive individuals have no symptoms and don't know they are infected: but the majority of them, possibly all of them, will eventually develop Aids and die; in the meantime, of course they may infect anyone they have sex with and any children they bear.
Chatwin replies:
This is hogwash. The word "Aids' is one of the cruelest and silliest neologisms of our time. "Aid" means help, succor, comfort, yet with a hissing sibilant tacked onto the end it becomes a nightmare. It should never be used in front of patients. HIV (Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus) is a perfectly easy name to live with. "Aids" causes panic and despair and has probably done something to facilitate the spread of the disease. HIV is not some gay Gotterdammerung: it is another African virus, a very dangerous one, presenting the greatest challenge to medicine since tuberculosis, but one for which a cure will be found. Any virus, be it chicken-pox, mumps or HIV, will create a kind of mirror image of itself known as an 'antibody" which in time will stabilize the infected person. That should be the pattern. But HIV is a very slippery customer. There is no positive evidence of antibodies at work, only negative evidence that a great many infected people are alive. In one case in the US an infected person suddenly became HIV negative. We should, in fact, take Mr. Ryle's own figures. There have been 800,000 infected persons in the United States, of whom 80,000 have died. That means nine survivors to one death. That can only mean one thing: that some mechanism, pharmaceutical or otherwise, is keeping them alive.
What is most horrifying about Mr Ryle's article is the callous cruelty with which he condemns hundreds of thousands of people to death If a young man who has just been told that he is HIV positive got hold of the article, the chances are he might commit suicide. There have been many such cases.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
