David Gilbert - Dangerous To Your Health lyrics

It is this dangerous diversion from focusing on the preventive measures so urgently needed to save lives that makes the rash of conspiracy theories so disturbing. That's the concern that compelled the writing of this paper. I've been doing AIDS education in prison for over nine years; these conspiracy myths have proven to be the main internal obstacle – in terms of prisoners' consciousness – to concentrating on thorough and detailed work on risk reduction. What's the use, believers ask, of making all the hard choices to avoid spreading or contracting the disease if the government is going to find a way to infect people anyway? And what's the point of all the ha**les of safer s**, or all the inconvenience of not sharing needles, if HIV can be spread, as many conspiracy theorists claim, by casual contact such as sneezing or handling dishes? The core of the mind-set that undermines prevention efforts is "denial." People whose activities have put them at risk are often so petrified that they don't even want to think about it. Conspiracy theories serve up a hip and seemingly militant rationale for not confronting one's own risk practices. At the same time, such theories provide an apparently simple and satisfying alternative to the complex challenge of dealing with the myriad of social, behavioral, and medical factors that propel the epidemic. In addition to my extensive personal experience, a recent study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that New Afrikans who believed in the conspiracy theories are significantly less likely to use condoms or to get tested for HIV. 10 To put it bluntly: The false conspiracy theories are themselves a contributing factor to the terrible toll of unnecessary AIDS d**hs among people of color. While convinced by scientists I know that humans did not design HIV, my main concern here is not to disprove the conspiracy theories. Neither do i attempt to solve the problem of the origins of AIDS or even review the many different theories and approaches to that question. The origin of this disease, as of many others, is likely to remain unsolved for years to come. Various theories of AIDS origins include: a virus that jumped species, an accidental byproduct of biological warfare experiments on animals, a new viral mutation, and a virus that lived in an isolated ecological niche until new social conditions facilitated the explosion of an epidemic. There is also a set of theories based on the now highly dubious proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. (For excellent discussions of HIV's likely history and the social factors that facilitated the explosion of the epidemic, see Gabriel Rotello, "The Birth of AIDS," OUT, April, 1994, and Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, pp. 281-390.) Instead this article examines the validity of one set of theories being widely propagated to prisoners and to New Afrikan communities: that HIV was deliberately spliced together in the lab as a weapon of genocide. These theories have had important public health and political implications. My urgent, life and d**h purpose is to refocus attention on AIDS prevention and care and, more broadly, on the struggle against the racist and profit-driven character of a public health system that is causing tens of thousands of unnecessary d**hs. Readers not interested in a detailed critique of the conspiracy theories are invited to skip right to the last three sections of this essay, starting with "The Real Genocide." Hopefully, that is also where all readers will concentrate their attention.