2 minute read
NETTY'S WORLD by Netty Wendt
Plague on both your houses
) Hands up who knows the first recorded death from Aids. If, like me, you’re kinda thinking ‘junkie flu’ victim sometime in the 1970s, think again. It was 1959. Nobody knew what caused David Carr’s immune system to breakdown. Thankfully, staff at the Manchester Royal Infirmary had the foresight to save some of his tissue, and decades later the killer we now know as HIV was found in those samples.
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Viruses are scary. They evolve and mutate, sometimes with terrifying alacrity, often as a result of human interferences in the food chain or acts against nature. Did HIV enter our world because humans ate infected chimpanzees? Some scientists also suggest a polio vaccine administered in sub-Saharan Africa was made with simian cells. We’re slowly learning; there’s a reason why that vegan aisle is now busy in Sainsbury’s.
Well, here we are again. Coronaviruses per se have been around for hundreds of years. Covid-19 could have remained in the realm of bats, but now we’re hosting the party. In the words of David Essex, “Oh what a circus!”.
There are so many similarities in the way society reacts in a time of contagion. When Aids first hit the headlines in the 1980s, I was a teenager. It seemed like the end of the world. Conspiracy theories abounded. Was it manufactured in a lab by an enemy nation? Was it a smite from the hand of God? Maggie Thatcher’s government announced a vaccine could be available in two years (that rings a bell). “Wear a condom and change your sexual behaviour” has become “wear a mask and don’t go out”.
The main difference with Covid is that it is airborne, something scientists were loath to admit because it smacks of plagues, talk of ‘miasma’ (bad air), the hocus-pocus of an ill wind blowing “ring-a-ringa-roses” and mass graves. Well pass me my pointy-nosed apothecary’s mask ‘coz this shit is real! It will eventually pass, but at what cost remains to be seen. Aids ravaged a generation and hasn’t exactly gone away.
I wonder if this will be the pandemic that wakes us. HIV was probably around at the beginning of the last century, like the children’s game of ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’. Governments ignored the evidence because it was only pockets of poor Africans, then gay men and junkies dying. Suddenly Mr Wolf swung around screaming “Time to eat you all!”, and thousands of ‘innocent’ haemophiliacs, housewives, white heterosexual men and babies began dying worldwide.
Too little too late will be history’s take on HIV, I feel the same about Covid. We didn’t close our borders for economic reasons. We failed to prepare for the arrival of a monster that we could all see hurtling down the tracks. Outbreaks of disease are inevitable, pandemics are preventable. The human population has tripled since the 1950s, we’ve gone viral. I say prevention is better than cure. Stop eating and mistreating other species. Condoms are good contraception and disease protection. Oh, and while you’re at it, empower women.
