I wish someone could explain to me exactly what the upside is in allowing people infected with the HIV/AIDS disease to now emigrate into our country after being banned from doing so for years?
Have we not been hammered by Obama and his liberal allies in Congress over the last year or so about how our terrible decrepit healthcare system is already way too expensive and on the verge of collapsing our economy as it is? If that’s the case why do we need thousands of immigrants from other countries coming to American and burdening our already overwhelmed hospitals and medical facilities with their extremely expensive health problems? In addition, with all of the truly important problems we are dealing with in this country one has to wonder what in the world brought this particular issue to the forefront?
This guy can’t make a decision on the request for much needed additional troops from his hand picked commander on the ground in Afghanistan but boy he sure doesn’t mess around with pressing issues such as allowing people with deadly diseases into OUR country.
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As usual, it’s Bush’s fault.
nymag.com–When David Simpson was working at Mount Sinai Medical Center as a young neurologist in 1984, the neuro-AIDS program occupied a dark warren of tiny rooms in the complex’s basement. It was a place overwhelmed by plague, a final stop on a doomed journey. “People came in with seizures or paralyzed on half their body. People came in in comas. Men were screaming—I have videotapes of this,” says Simpson, the program’s director. “Bedbound, incontinent, couldn’t sleep. They could be dead in a number of days.” (SNIP) Some fifteen years into the era of protease inhibitors and drug cocktails, doctors are realizing that the miracles the drugs promised are not necessarily a lasting solution to the disease. Most news accounts today call HIV a chronic, manageable disease. But patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging. Early senility turns out to be an increasingly common problem, though not nearly as extreme as James’s in every case. One large-scale multi-city study released its latest findings this summer that over half of the HIV-positive population is suffering some form of cognitive impairment. Doctors are also reporting a constellation of ailments in middle-aged patients that are more typically seen at geriatric practices, in patients 80 and older. They range from bone loss to organ failure to arthritis. Making matters worse, HIV patients are registering higher rates of insulin resistance and cholesterol imbalances, and they suffer elevated rates of melanoma and kidney cancers and seven times the rate of other non-HIV-related cancers.
Whether this is a result of the drugs or the disease itself, or some combination, is still an open question and certainly varies from patient to patient and condition to condition. Either way, it is now clear that even patients who respond well to medications by today’s standards are not out of the woods. Current life-expectancy charts show that people on HIV medications could live twenty fewer years on average than the general population. “It’s spooky,” says Mark Harrington, who heads Treatment Action Group, a New York–based HIV think tank. “It seems like the virus keeps finding new tricks to throw at us, and we’re just all left behind going, What’s going on?”…..
