[LINK] Two articles on HIV/AIDS

[rfmcdonald]

The XVI International AIDS Conference is ongoing in Toronto, making the front pages of all the newspapers with its conferences and protests and concerts and live speeches. (Last night's conversation between Bill Gates and Bill Clinton was particularly big. The insertion of celebrity culture in relation to one of the worst pandemics in human history leaves me disturbed. Yes, it's for a good cause, but do we really need Richard Gere and Alicia Keys' that much? Even though I suppose we do, and even though I can see this approach as a useful sort of commodification of ACT-UP's strategies of confrontation, it still strikes me as off.

There have been some interesting articles produced in the local press. One describes the mysteries surrounding the first HIV/AIDS fatality in Toronto, a person who, as Tanya Talaga reported in the Toronto Star before the conference began, was a former nun.

She was a medical mystery. The 52-year-old woman admitted to the intensive care unit at Toronto General Hospital had a fever of unknown origin.

She was losing weight rapidly, her immune system was crashing and a biopsy of her lung showed a rare infection called pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.

The woman, a Canadian nun, would have been on a ventilator and unable to communicate, unable to tell her story. Doctors could not save her and she died in 1981. We do not know her name or what she looked like.

This is all we know of her story: She had lived and worked in Haiti for 20 years until 1972 when she left her religious order to help rehabilitate prostitutes in Port-au-Prince. She had one male sexual partner before she left Haiti in November 1979. It wasn't until two years after she died that her doctors realized she probably died of AIDS--among the first, if not the first, of Toronto's AIDS casualties.

In The Globe and Mail, meanwhile, Carolyn Abraham examines the genetic factors that have let some people withstand the ravages of HIV much better than others.

In the 25 years that Ron Rosenes has lived with HIV, he has always suspected something more than good fortune shielded him from the worst of the disease.

Mr. Rosenes feels he contracted the AIDS virus before anyone knew it existed and "safe sex" became the mantra of a generation. "I was sexually very active in the late seventies," he said.

He has lost several friends and a close cousin to AIDS. In 1990, he watched his partner of 15 years die in the home they shared.

But even as he lost weight, left his job and made do with the "sub-optimal therapies" of the early nineties, Mr. Rosenes held on.

He never suffered the opportunistic infections others endured. He never picked up anything life threatening. Although his viral load soared and certain immune cells plummeted, blood test after blood test showed a healthy presence of other immune cells.

"It became more obvious to me, especially after [my partner] died, that I was being spared."

The 59-year-old Toronto man may well have his family history to thank. Mr. Rosenes carries a gift in his genes -- a mutation that confers a natural resistance to HIV. In all likelihood, it was passed down to him from his ancestors in Europe, where the protective trait is most prevalent.