Question

Dr. Mervyn Silverman says, in an interview from Part 1 Age of AIDS that “AIDS was the most political disease I had ever seen or read about.”

What does he mean?

How did your understanding of this statement change or grow by the viewing of the film? –particularly attend to the many senses of the word ‘political’—as well as the fact that the statement applies equally well to global issues as to domestic ones.

Answer 1

Actually it was the scenerio that was happened during in the 70's and early 80's.What Dr.Mervyn silverman said was absolutely true at that situation ,Because at that time the problem of AIDS was facing both external and internal political resistance which stated as below-

External political issues-He blamed politics that was unable to utilise the opportunities and intenionally missed the availble opporunities that resulted in the disease not being checked early which end up in spreading and spreading.In early years epidemologists noticed that epidemic started in Africa.But the african countries saw that as the west again in pointing their finger at Africa,as they went in to state of denial.African government worried about economic programs;they were worried about tourism,what have you.so the African health ministry in reagard to AIDS, ordered their health team to 'DON'T LOOK FOR IT ,IF YOU DONT LOOK FOR IT , YOU DON'T FIND IT ; YOU DON'T REPORT IT ; THEN OSTENSIBLY YOOU DON'T HAVE IT.while this denial was going on,the disease taken a fast track vehicle landed with huge number of victims by spreading and spreading.

INTERNAL POLITICS- In those days the government was very slow in coming forward with monies.Now a days National institute of health had huge amount of money,but in those days they didn't have a lot of money.It was very difficult and it took a long time to get reaserch started through getting funding from own federal governement,so one of the things that the American foundation for AIDS reaserch could do was turn around a request of funds for reaserch in literally months,a few months , as opposed to 12- 18 months.

Finally in this scenerio he could go down a litany,a laundry list of where politicians and governments(both own federal and african) have complicated our dealing with the disease and have made it a world wide PANDEMIC.