By Dr. Thoburn F. Thompson, resident of Albert Lea

A big bear walks into the hospital (Roanoke Times, June, 25, 2004)

On June 15, a bear walked into the Franklin County Hospital, Virginia; 345 pounds of black bear in a secure, modern health facility! The motion sensors politely opened two sets of doors for this Blue Ridge Mountain food-seeking monster. An alarm was sounded and the immediate reaction was denial; &045; ‘you got to be kidding’, ‘no way’.

In due time the bear was eliminated and he will no longer be ambling around.

The world of communicable disease is full of very, very large bears: HIV/Aids, SARS, Bird Flu, Influenza, STDs, and drug resistant Tuberculosis and Malaria. Many nasty small bears are around, too.

We North Americans cannot be complacent about what is going on in the world of actual and potential epidemics. Our own highly technical and advanced society has tended to be in denial. The Russian government and the South African president denied that HIV/AlDs was a problem for them-until the epidemic was well established. The social dislocation and the economic costs of those dead and dying of HIV/AlDs has become all too obvious. The Russian government is facing the probable infection of 750,000 of its citizens. Russia already has a shrinking labor force. 50 percent of Russian men are dying before retirement age (15 percent in the USA). Fertility is down. Russian women do not bear enough children to maintain the population.

Even without AIDs’ deaths the population is projected to fall by 30 percent in the next 15 years. Unemployment, alcoholism, and now HIV/AlDs is threatening the very existence of this once powerful country.. The Russian government has no coherent policy or plan for the epidemic. Denial is not a strategy.

The South African president denied evidence that the HIVirus and AIDs are related. Now it is catch up time. Family systems are destroyed by the epidemic and national productivity plummets. At last that government, under strong international pressure, began to manufacture antiviral generic medications and treat those infected.

Chinese government health officials knew of the SARS outbreak last year, but suppressed any public announcement of the illness for weeks. They only moved beyond denial when over a hundred deaths occurred. Panic and realistic concern brought international travel and tourism to a screeching halt. The Canadian SARS outbreak began with an infected man traveling from China to Toronto.

Globally, HIV/AIDs is more and more a disease of women. Women are more vulnerable because of biological, social and political factors and especially poverty. They are more vulnerable to transmission, often distant from prevention and care, and susceptible to human rights violations and sexual exploitation. Transmission of the virus through breast milk can be prevented, but societal and economic factors block efforts to spread the information that would save infants. In the USA, AIDs is the fourth leading cause of death in women 25-44, and the leading cause of death in African -American women ages 25-34.

The culture of denial is lethal in outbreaks of contagious disease. International cooperation, interchange of statistics, development of vaccines and disease surveillance are urgent and critical. Our own national consciousness needs to be raised. Complacency and underfunded campaigns such as the promised Global HIV/AIDS/Malaria/Tuberculosis Campaign ($3 billion/year for five years promised by the USA; $1.2 billion spent in 2003) only postpone getting rid of the bears waiting at our door. Denial is costly, to us, to commerce, and to the human family to which we belong.

Today is International HIV/AlDs awareness day. Be informed, be concerned.

(Dr. Thoburn F. Thompson is a resident of Albert Lea.)