Reddit mentions: The best aids books

Busy making the ads run on time for Lord Walmart and the Duke of Target, and no access to academic libraries at my work place, but....

to get a sense of the feeling that people out there care about intellectual life and community around it
http://www.cnps.org/
http://makezine.com/

for working class artists
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1993/4/93.04.10.x.html

for self taught scientists making breakthroughs
http://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Memories-Thirteen-Years-Family/dp/0226542378/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342117568&sr=8-1&keywords=cynthia+moss
or almost any of major, mostly female, field scientists making major breakthroughs in animal behavior in the last century (Katy Payne, Jane Goodall)

for strategy of self teaching medicine in the AIDS crisis (haven't read the actual book, but I know the actual people who went and learned the science to the level of professionals)
http://www.amazon.com/Impure-Science-Activism-Politics-Knowledge/dp/0520214455

for GI bill allowing access to US education
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/life_20.html
http://articles.boston.com/2009-09-10/ae/29265095_1_gi-bill-higher-education-authors

for rhetoric of 68 occupy movement
http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm

eh, figure out the connections yourself.

for evidence of academic training being sort of a scam, read the OP

Or

The number of jobs listed with the American Historical Association fell 23.8 percent in 2008-9 and the total jobs listed -- 806 -- was the smallest in a decade. And the 23.8 percent figure doesn't reflect the extent of the drop: A survey by the AHA of those departments that posted jobs found that about 15 percent of searches were called off after positions were listed.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/04/nojobs#ixzz20R1XSZcr
Inside Higher Ed

Cf with number of people who think history is interesting.

I could find no references to dolphin behavior studies on international shipping company websites, however, I do have to admit that the top references to dolphin behavior on google are all private companies, e.g. seaworld, the discovery channel. So maybe it's true that capitalism does better at giving people a chance at joy than academia. I suppose my day job funds tropical alpine field botany pretty well too.

for academia as hoodwinking, weeding, and monopolistic institution, see
also see grades, access to academic journals, library access, tenure, student loan debt, etc.

For population on earth.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1993/4/93.04.10.x.html
The 99th Percentile is just shy of 100 million people. See calculator.

For fact that there are smart people out in them fields, I'm citing Imogen Juanita Shaw, from Oklahoma, 1918-1993. She might be thinking of her husband. Of his 5 best friends, he was the only one who survived (gang warfare) into his thirties. He was able to parlay his friendship with a mob family into opening a restaurant, but when the mob boss was assasinated in the fifties, he lost everything and became an alcoholic. He used to build beatiful sculptures in his garage and read every history book he could get his hands on.

for disruptive effects of internet, google mubarak. Also observe what you just typed, and cf with academic research libraries.
For further information, go read a lot of books, and remember, underneath the paving stones, the beach.

Shameless self-promotion, but the Ebola primer I linked above has a LOT of resources linked. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive work on the matter is the Mühlheimer-Hensley-Towner book (2017) – pricey, but worth every penny and very informative. From a more popular perspective, David Quammen’s Ebola is a great read – it’s a chapter from his bigger opus, Spillover, excerpted and updated for the epidemic. Abdullah and Rashid’s book Ebola is interesting from an international aid and cooperation perspective. Finally, as a basis of comparison, Peter Piot’s autobiography, written well before Ebola was really understood, is worth reading.

Since most historians agree that AIDS originated in Africa, how could it be linked to the polio vaccine if Salk and Sabin's trials were conducted in the U.S., the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

>In March 1951, several years before Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin would scuffle over whose vaccine was the true prophylactic, Dr. Hilary Koprowski announced at a medical conference that he had become the first doctor in history to test polio vaccine on humans. His “volunteers” included several institutionalized children with mental handicaps. They drank the vaccine in chocolate milk.

>From 1957 to 1960, after years of tinkering with monkey kidneys and polio germs, Koprowski tested his own experimental polio vaccine on 325,000 equatorial Africans, including 75,000 citizens of Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Zaire).

>Called by drums, rural natives traveled to local villages where they had a liquid vaccines squirted into their mouths. 98% of the vaccine recipients were infants and toddlers. The youngest children received 15 times the adult dosage. Though Koprowski claimed he had the backing of the World Health Organization, WHO denied sanctioning the large-scale trials.

In 1959, Albert Sabin published a study that claimed that Koprowski's polio vaccine used in the African trials contained un “unidentified” and “unstable” cell-killing virus. Although he was quick to point out the flaws in the vaccine of Koprowski, his professional rival, unfortunately his ability to detect viruses in the polio vaccine fell short when it came to mass contamination of Sabin's own polio vaccine with SV-40.

In response to Sabin's claims of contamination, Koprowski simply scoffed at him and said he was just trying to discredit his work (as he would do again and again to anyone making this accusation). The virus allegedly detected by Sabin was never identified.

Until recently, the earliest known blood sample containing antibodies against HIV was traced back to 1959. The serum came from a patient visiting a clinic in Leopoldville, one of the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic that would occur a decade later.


>Gerald Myers, a genetic sequencing expert with Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, tracked the evolution of HIV and confirmed that today's major subtypes of the AIDS virus in humans appear to have arisen as recently as 1960.

>Although this time period is widely accepted by medical researchers, more recent conflicting reports suggest that the first HIV infection may have occurred years earlier.

Regardless of when the first HIV infection occurred, it would seem to be premature to dismiss the OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine) AIDS hypothesis on this basis alone. The timing of the first HIV infection is irrelevant to the question of whether or not some doses of the experimental polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s were contaminated, thus precipitating a future outbreak.

>Koprowski's vaccine was not approved for human use, so it was discontinued in 1960 following the African trials. Thus, it was only administered to inhabitants of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi—the precise area where high levels of HIV infection were identified by researcher 30 years later.

>Furthermore, the AIDS virus is known to infect mucous cells, prevalent in the mouth. The African vaccines were squirted into people's mouths.

>Could squirting an HIV-contaminated polio vaccine into people's mouths cause AIDS? According to Tom Folks, chief retrovirologist at the CDC, “Any time a person has a lesion in his mouth, then there could be transmission” of the virus.

Dr. Robert Bohannon of Baylor College of Medicine asserts that squiring polio vaccines into one's mouth would tend to aerosolize some of the liquid. Small drops could then go into the lungs, and from there to the blood cells susceptible to infection. This could be an efficient mode of HIV transmission.

Experts believe that the average time between HIV infection and the development of AIDS is approximately 8-10 years.

>If the African polio vaccine was indeed contaminated with SIV/HIV, initial outbreaks of AIDS would have occurred from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. This period accurately coincides with the emergence of AIDS in equatorial Africa.

Understandably, authorities are very reluctant to admit that there's even a possibility that scientists may have contributed to the AIDS pandemic by growing polio vaccines in virus-laden monkey kidneys.

In 1992, Tom Curtis published a story for Rolling Stone that created quite a stir.

Although dismissed by most experts, “a few scientists, notably the biologist W.D. Hamilton, thought the hypothesis required serious investigation, but they received little support from the scientific community.”

William Haseltine, a professor at Harvard, believes that hypothesizing about the origin of AIDS is distracting and nonproductive, saying, “It's not relevant...I'm not interested in discussing it.” Dr. David Heymann, head of the WHO's Global Program of AIDS, stated that “the origin of the AIDS virus is of no importance to science today.”

Jonas Salk wouldn't comment on the possibility, as apparently he was too busy working on an AIDS vaccine, and Sabin's response was “you can't hang Koprowski with that.” Koprowski himself initially dismissed the idea with a laugh, and then later said that “this is a highly theoretical situation.”

His amusement must not have lasted long, because Koprowski sued Curtis and Rolling Stone for “...the destruction of (his) professional and personal reputation, for mental and emotional suffering, and for...humiliation and embarrassment.” As a result the magazine was ordered to pay $1 in damages. [See The Seeds of Doom by Christian Biasco]

However, both Tom Folks of the CDC and Robert Gallo thought testing the seed stocks of polio might be a good idea. According to Folks, “any time we can learn more about the natural history [of AIDS], it helps us understand the pathogenesis and...the transmission.”

Gallo believes that questions like this “are of more than academic interest because answering them may help avoid future zoonitic catastrophes—that is, transmission of disease from lower animals to humans.”

>Responding to these concerns, some AIDS researchers formally requested samples of the original polio vaccine seed stocks. But the government would neither release nor test them because there are “only a small number of vials” of the material, and tests “might use it all up.”

Inspired by Curtis' investigative report, a British writer named Edward Hooper traveled in Africa, Europe, and the United States for seven years. As a result of his research, he published a book in 1999 called The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.

Although the scientific community generally rejects the OPV AIDS hypothesis, Hooper “criticizes the research and conduct of many of the scientists involved in the investigation and alleges a 'very substantial cover-up' took place to silence the hypothesis.”

One of the several arguments against the hypothesis was that Koprowski was not using chimpanzees in his experiments, and therefore HIV contamination didn't occur. However, eyewitness testimony suggests otherwise.

>In 2004, The Origins of AIDS, a French TV documentary strongly supportive of the OPV hypothesis, appeared on several television stations around the world.

The film offers a convincing case for the hypothesis, and seriously challenges the questionable nature of the categorical denials by Koprowski and others that no chimpanzees were used in the development of his experimental vaccine.

> Erotica was her using her power to make an uncompromising album about sex and AIDS and freaky shit but telling you it’s not freaky to be into freaky shit. It wasn’t her best album, but it was a brave one!

It was an incredibly risky move for her, especially given the period. To give some context, pop culture was considerably less-sexual in the very beginning of the 1990s in the wake of the AIDS crisis, which was impacting not only queer and POC communities on the fringe but also mainstream society. The explicitly exuberant sexuality of Madonna’s Erotica era was a world away from the chaste female-led soft pop and adult contemporary of the Wilson Phillips, Amy Grants and Roxettes that had been dominating the cultural conversation for the early years of the decade; and as you said, it was really brave of her to do so. To make such a sex-positive and queer-positive album in the days of “No glove no love” was groundbreaking, and certainly influential.

(For more information about what queer life was like in the early 1990s, I’d recommend Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life In America for an incredible analysis of what life was like for already-marginalized communities living in the shadow of an epidemic.)

Edit: grammar

If anyone has not yet read it, I highly recommend And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. This is the synopsis:

Upon it's first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigatve reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.

I read it and it was fantastic. It's everything you ever wanted to know about the beginnings of AIDS from insiders who were really researching and in the middle of it (and affected by it).

Thanks for posting the links! I also have to recommend the book it was based on "And the band played on." I read it while in high school, and it is one of those books that stays with you. I honestly felt like it influenced my life and how I view public health. It has a lot of different aspects to it, and I highly recommend reading it.

It is well-known in public health circles that Reagan really dropped the ball at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

The entire story is told really well in the book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts.

A lot of the comments here are suggesting that Reagan didn't do anything wrong, because there weren't good treatments available at the time, and that wasn't his fault. That's true, but it was becoming increasingly clear that gay people were at much higher risk, and this was likely due to AIDS being a sexually transmitted disease. Instead of focusing efforts towards education on safe sex, Reagan did nothing. His surgeon general, C Everett Koop, defied the wishes of the White House and sent information pamphlets to all households in the US talking about condoms and safe sex practices.

Very late here. I was a child in the 80's. I can remember a friend asking me on my swingset what AIDS was and doing the best an 8 year old could to reassure her. Then a few years later received a [pamphlet] (http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/QQ/p-nid/87) in the mail from the government.

We had a man in our church who contacted AIDS through blood transfusions during surgery. My mother told me his wife contracted it by cleaning and caring for me. Even then I thought that was bullshit.

By the time I was having sex everyone knew you just needed to use condoms and that was it.

I highly recommend the book [And the Band Played On] (http://www.amazon.com/And-Band-Played-On-20th-Anniversary/dp/0312374631/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341674599&sr=8-1&keywords=and+the+band+played+on) by Randy Shilts.

axolotl_peyotl: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link

From The Health Century by Edward Shorter: "Her treatment became a scandal within the scientific community."

Apparently it also later became the subject of a congressional inquiry, but I haven't had the chance to confirm that.

The Virus and the Vaccine is great, but it really should be read with Dr. Mary's Monkey by Edward Haslam and Me and Lee by Judyth Vary Baker.

The three of these together paint an incredible picture of one of the craziest stories of the 20th century.

I've heard The River is great too but I haven't read it.

Lucky for me my recovery week was during the summer olympics so there was constant mildly entertaining television to watch. I also played a lot of Lego Harry Potter on Xbox (lol) and watched a ton of Netflix/Hulu/etc. I did some reading too but not as much as I had anticipated since I chose a fairly heavy book to read (And the Band Played On which, at 10 months post op, I'm still reading lmao). I also had friends over which helped a ton.

I was going to link to the TED talk(and I suppose I am..), but I continued to the authors wiki and the amazon book page.

Amazon low-star reviews have always gotten to me for some reason, so perhaps your comment holds some weight.

I found the talk interesting nonetheless :)

Not quite the same as your examples, but some of my favorite non-fiction science are...

The Coming Plague

And The Band Played On

The Disappearing Spoon

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

I could probably come up with a few others if any of these seem to be what interests you.

There were two distinct emergences of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. One was among gay (and predominantly white) men – the first cases, in 1982, were from two gay white flight attendants who had travelled to (and presumably had sex in) the United States. A sample set of blood specimens was taken soon after from 250 gay men in Johannesburg - with a 12.8% positivity rate. However, HIV crossing over from this population to the larger (black/African) population, and being the source of the present day epidemic, is unlikely.

Where that epidemic arises is rooted in the larger epidemiological behavior of the virus across Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a very long story but I’ll try to be as concise as I can. HIV has been a functional virus in humans for a century at least, only it didn't begin to spread in any substantial degree until colonial development of the lower continent began to include the growth of trade centers connected by roads and by rivers travelled frequently by boats. HIV, like most infectious diseases, requires proximity; that is, it requires a significantly dense population that it can “jump” from one person to another at an effective enough rate to maintain its spread. For the first 50 or so years of its life in humans, it was too isolated – one or two individuals infected in a village, who became sick and died before they were able to spread it to anyone outside the village. However, with roads and trade centers and places where one could go to work (usually mining) there came both high concentrations of people and a sex trade.

So from the 1950s and 1960s on, there was a steady growth of an urban and regional network capable of ever more efficiently spreading the virus. Enter South African migrant workers – men travelling within the wider region (often to Malawi, which had a high HIV prevalence) to earn money in mining operations and other manual labor fields, some of whom would acquire HIV from sex workers, and when returning home to their regular partners in South Africa, would infect them. The first cases among this population were in 1987, and by 1991, heterosexual-attributed transmission reached (and then exceeded) homosexual transmission in South Africa.

Two other factors leading to the spread of HIV in South Africa (especially in black/African communities): low circumcision prevalence and high multiple concurrent partner prevalence. Circumcision significantly reduces the risk for HIV acquisition from a female partner – and in South Africa, there is not a high prevalence of traditional circumcision, and only in recent years has circumcision been encouraged as an HIV prevention tactic. Second, multiple concurrent sexual partners in southern Africa (not everywhere, it varies by region/tribe, but was quite prevalent) meant it was both common and socially acceptable for nonmonogamy to occur. And this, of course, significantly compounded the spread of HIV.

Sources:
http://www.avert.org/history-aids-south-africa.htm

http://www.consultancyafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=887:sexual-networks-and-multiple-concurrent-sexual-partnerships&catid=61:hiv-aids-discussion-papers&Itemid=268

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/12/09-072975/en/

http://www.amazon.com/Tinderbox-Sparked-Epidemic-Finally-Overcome/dp/0143123009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377971556&sr=8-1&keywords=tinderbox

And I have a master’s in Public Health.

I'm not a gay man, but read And The Band Played On. It gives a really good account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Another great book is And The Band Played On. It tells the story of a group of doctors who, with their funding cut by the government, defy the odds to fight this deadly disease. It also tells of the squabbling between French and American scientists over who got credit for discovering the disease, as well as prototypical AIDS cases that occurred before the disease spread in the late '70s and early '80s.

I share your frustration. HIV incubated quietly for a decade before the bodies started to pile up. When the next lethal megavirus emerges (and it will), PreP won't save us. The condom-free crew will have already infected millions of our neighbors and partners. We can only hope that it won't be as deadly as the AIDS complex.

​

I worry about the deaths, but I also worry about the future of our rights and our place within modern society. We are currently at the "fool me once" stage of global sexual disease transmission. If the next virus is as lethal as HIV and the gay community is the leading carrier again, I am worried that the world will be less forgiving.

​

I'm not opposed to casual sex, by the way. Have had around 50 partners. I just consider it a personal duty to protect our community's reputation by refraining from unsafe sex. All sex without a condom is unsafe outside of an exclusive relationship.

​

My reasoning and instincts come from this book, which discusses the cultural response to the spread of HIV/AIDS, situation within the context of the bathhouse and free love subcultures of the 70s and 80s.

https://www.amazon.com/Band-Played-Politics-Epidemic-20th-Anniversary/dp/0312374631

On that subject, And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts is an excellent book if you're looking for a well-assembled treatment of why there was so much public silence about AIDS while the epidemic was on the rise.

You stop aids by providing services to those who are at risk. That means needle shares for junkies and safe working conditions for prostitutes. Making prostitution legal gives prostitutes power to refuse service and to enforce safe safe sex practices. If you don't believe me believe an epidemiologist who works for the UN. Wisdom of Whores

A professor of mine actually wrote a book on the Australian response to AIDS, here's an Amazon link if you're curious: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Trust-Australian-Responses-Aids/dp/0868407186

I haven't read it, just heard him talk, but he's a good historian.

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Disco's Out...Murder's In!: The True Story of Frank the Shank and L.A.'s Deadliest Punk Rock Gang

Not a biography but:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Sorry. That took me a minute. I see you deleted the post and idk if you still see the comments but I'll leave this here just in case. I haven't read them all. Also, Dan Savage gives lots of book recommendations on his podcast. Good luck!

https://www.amazon.com/Gay-Revolution-Story-Struggle/dp/1451694121

https://www.amazon.com/Mayor-Castro-Street-Stonewall-Editions/dp/0312019009/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=the+mayor+of+castro+street&qid=1565617125&s=gateway&sr=8-3

amazon.com/Stonewall-Revival-Christopher-Theatrical-Adventures/dp/0999863703/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

https://www.amazon.com/Gets-Better-Overcoming-Bullying-Creating/dp/0452297613/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=it+gets+better&qid=1565617218&s=books&sr=1-2

https://www.amazon.com/Transgender-History-second-Todays-Revolution/dp/158005689X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1565617239&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/B002L7KS2K/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=history+of+aids&qid=1565617261&s=books&sr=1-1 (maybe)

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Pride-LGBTQ-Heroes-Changed/dp/0062571702/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The sheer number of denialist theories is stunning. Ian Young's bibliographic The AIDS Dissidents lists off at least 150 of them. I'm curious as to the status of those who are listed in the book, since it was written almost 20 years ago.

I heard it in the early nineties back when The Myth Of Heterosexual Aids was published. At the time, it was a politically incorrect thing to say, because AIDS was being spun as an equal opportunity disease, and any day now, it was going to explode in the straight population just as it did in the gay population.

Actually, rhetoric of science is a rather burgeoning field. Check out Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.


Also, honorable mentions for Latour's Science in Action and Sontag's Illness as Metaphor,

I thought it was Gay Related Infectious Disease (I read And The Band Played On a while back and if anyone hasn't read that book I strongly suggest doing so).

This book is a fascinating history of the AIDS epidemic: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312374631/

And The Band Played On is worth a read, if you've not already read it.

Nope, because HIV can take six months to show up on a test.

As for why no monogamy exception: In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, plenty of men that were monogamous had unfaithful partners and thus they ended up with AIDS despite no risky sexual behavior themselves.

Source: And the Band Played On. Would recommend.

This is the book if you want to learn more. Amazing read. :-)

And the Band Played On.

http://www.amazon.com/Band-Played-Politics-Epidemic-20th-Anniversary-ebook/dp/B000V761ZA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404495976&sr=8-1&keywords=and+the+band+played+on

> And the Band Played On was critically acclaimed and became a best-seller. Judith Eannarino of the Library Journal called it "one of the most important books of the year", upon its release.[1] It made Shilts both a star and a pariah for his coverage of the disease and the bitter politics in the gay community. He described his motivation to undertake the writing of the book in an interview after its release, saying, "Any good reporter could have done this story, but I think the reason I did it, and no one else did, is because I am gay. It was happening to people I cared about and loved."[2] The book was adapted into an HBO docudrama of the same name in 1993. Shilts was tested for HIV while he was writing the book; he died of complications from AIDS in 1994.

I remember when I first saw this documentary years ago on cable (It was either IFC or Sundance) One of the most interesting and profound docs I've ever seen across all subject matters.
It's all based on Ed Hoopers book The River

This journalist has been following the story for almost 40 years:

"THE CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME (CFS) EPIDEMIC COVER-UP,
a bestseller on Amazon, makes it clear that the CDC can't tell the
world the truth about CFS because the science leads back to
AIDS and massive HIV fraud."

https://twitter.com/hhv6_university

Ortleb's new book is here --> https://www.amazon.com/Chronic-Fatigue-Syndrome-Epidemic-Cover-up-ebook/dp/B0796CT24Q/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

"In Rolling Stone, David Black said Ortleb's newspaper deserved a Pulitzer Prize."

As an add on to this, if anyone has a lot of time to kill read "And The Band Played On" which I believe is also a documentary. It's a long, long read but very interesting look at the AIDS epidemic from the beginning of the 80's up to 87 set against the framework of gay life at the time.

Get a set of these and sneak them into a MtG game. Play Go Fish or Poker with them.

There's an app too.

"And The Band Played On"

http://www.amazon.com/And-Band-Played-On-20th-Anniversary/dp/0312374631

showed that this was pretty much the position of the US government at the time too.

Since /u/monte_cristo_island already recommended The Origins of AIDS, I'll throw out AIDS at 30. The author was founding director for the Office of NIH History, and she lays out a lot of stuff that happened behind closed doors. Stuff that many researchers knew/know about, but not necessarily the public.

And the Band Played On is another really good one about the crisis as well as the political games that were being played while people died.

HIV/AIDS was exposed as a fairy tale a decade and a half ago by world-renowned retrovirologist Peter Deusberg. Check it out, it's a good read. This one too.

> This book falsifies ten lies that are the pillars of the HIV/AIDS dogma. These lies are that:

> 1 - AIDS is a new syndrome;

> 2 - The existence of HIV has been appropriately demonstrated;

> 3 - HIV is actually the cause of AIDS;

> 4 - Antiretroviral medications are helpful for AIDS sufferers;

> 5 - Seropositivity indicates an active process of HIV infection;

> 6 - AIDS is a contagious pathological process;

> 7 - HIV is responsible for numerous illnesses;

> 8 - It is better for people to know their serological HIV status;

> 9 - There is indeed an AIDS pandemic affecting the general population;

> 10 - All medical researchers agree, indisputably, that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Heterosexual-AIDS-Distorted-Partisan/dp/0895267292

A Polish American scientist working on the oral polio vaccine in present day Angola after World War II used Rhesus Monkies despite being told not to. Rhesus Monkies have Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV). He inoculated a million Angolans with this vaccine. The scientist later denied using Rhesus Monkies though his head lab technician confirmed it.

Short version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUbfzOZLMjQ

Long version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oitjxuQMWCY

THE BOOK http://www.amazon.com/The-River-Journey-Source-AIDS/dp/0316371378/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361668397&sr=8-1&keywords=the+river+edward+hooper

Yes, thank you, I'm aware. I am a gay man who volunteers with an HIV/AIDS organization. I might just know the history reasonably well.

These policies were made in a time of inadequate information, in response to a dramatic failure on the part of multiple state and medical industry actors. (I suggest And The Band Played On for a good overview of the early years of the crisis, and how many institutional fuckups contributed to the tainted blood .) They were completely understandable for the time, if still an "Ewww, gay sex is icky"-influenced overreaction - when AIDS was an inevitable death sentence, and associated exclusively with a disfavoured group.

However, with the last 25 years of advances in HIV testing and treatment, those policies are no longer reasonable precautions, but overreactions based more on fear than current scientific evidence.