 |
 |
Hi all, This was posted on the ABC's 20/20 message board. I guess Sarah has a grudge. Bonnie *************** Author: ahalo2 (Read all messages by this author) Author status: Preferred | Neutral | Ignored Thread Only: (6 messages) Thread Messages: FirstPrev | Next Re: Funding For Diseases 8:55AM PDT, Oct 14, 1999 momanator: I don't know a single person with HIV who voluntarily asked to be infected. Parkinson's and diabetes is genetic... so, um, if someone infected with these illnesses CHOOSE to have children, would that somehow make their children less "innocent" if they were to come down with the disease later? Having children is usually a VOLUNTARY act, isn't it? I don't disagree that some diseases are extremely underfunded, but I STRONGLY disagree with encouraging Congress to take away funding from one disease to make people with the lesser-funded diseases feel better. AIDS activists made the fight for funding political because they HAD to. AIDS wasn't mentioned by our President until 1985, and the first drug wasn't available to patients until 8 years after the disease was first discovered. *Eight years* for ONE treatment. And in those eight years HIV became an epidemic. It is ONLY since the research that AIDS deaths have slowed. That's gotta tell people something. I would think. If the political approach works for people who are desperately ill then more power to them. If a cause can find a celebrity to help, more power to them. We should be following the example of activists who find EFFECTIVE ways to get funding, not put them down for it or saying that the funds are somehow "undeserved" because of how the cause got Congress' attention or because the disease is a "voluntary" one. Six years ago 20/20 did a report on a nine year old girl with AIDS that aired three times... they talked about how NIH and the clinical trials had saved that girl's life. Now, they are "exposing" these same programs? After years of themselves focusing on AIDS and the treatments, they now turn around and blast the methods people have used to get funding? It makes no sense, to support an issue then once it looks like the trials are actually saving lives to turn around and push to have the funding taken away. As if the media, 20/20, whoever hasn't known all along that this is how AIDS activists finally got their effective treatments. It shows how very easily manipulated the public is, "pc", whatever. People though seem to forget there are actual lives at stake. I don't care what my sister's biological parents did to "deserve" HIV, this child is alive because of these treatments and I'm thankful for that. And I hate to see that people feel her life should come down to the mistakes of her parents, and that some people feel other "deserve" to be sick or die because of what their parents did. Sarah [log in to unmask]