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HIV History Suggests an Even More Paranoid Future For Ebola

"STOP THE FLIGHTS!" is just the beginning.
Image: CDC

HIV and the Ebola virus share some interesting and entirely sinister traits. One of those is extended incubation: Ebola can take up to three weeks to manifest as symptoms, while HIV can take years. Once either virus has incubated and built its viral armies, it goes to work. Ebola will eventually kill around half of its victims and, untreated, HIV will eventually progress to AIDS, with a guaranteed death not far behind.

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The quiet period is dangerous. Ebola patients aren't infectious without symptoms, while HIV patients very quickly become infectious, which is one kind of danger. But the more subtle problem comes in the form of disease paranoia.

Like Cold War spies, if you can't see your "enemy," everyone becomes one. It's not enough to say that, hey, there have only been three total Ebola infections in the US compared to many thousands in West Africa, because anyone can still imagine any number of Ebola carriers and there won't be much we can say to assuage that fear.

Nor can we say that every precaution is being taken because, you know, nurses have it, the exact people that we might expect to be taking every precaution above and beyond. So we have absolute ridiculousness: a teacher sent home just for being within the city limits of Dallas for a conference. Nevermind that all of her activities occurred at least a cool 10 miles from anything to do with Ebola, and that Dallas is a city full of 1.25 million people, only two of which have successfully contracted the Ebola virus and they did so in about the highest-risk environment imaginable: an actual Ebola ward dealing with Ebola-infected bodily fluids.

Ah, and then there was the woman who found herself locked in an airliner bathroom after vomiting (on a plane!), the mob of parents yanking kids from a Mississippi school after learning the school's principle had recently been in Zaire, an Ebola-free country 3,000 miles away from West Africa, and a middle school in Maine locking up one of its students after the student mistakenly said that her father was being tested for Ebola.

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Fear coupled with a lack of information is a powerful thing. That's not to say information in a factual or reasonable sense, but information in the sense of being able to quickly observe and evaluate the health of a stranger.

So we get paranoia and, naturally, conspiracy theories. Take noted awesome human Chris Brown, for example, suggesting over Twitter that Ebola is a form of population control. And then there's the reasonably widespread notion (read: Snopes-able) that the CDC is scheming to get rich off of its Ebola patent. You can find all of this in the mainstream, without even having to venture to gutters of Infowars, where things get fully, completely fucked up, starting with the you-saw-it-coming "Obola."

This is all facilitated if not forced by the virus's invisibility. The unchecked, uninformed imagination is a horrified/horrifying thing. Where is it? Who has it?

So it was with AIDS. Even the people in charge got swept up into the hysteria. In 1988, the peak of the AIDS epidemic, New York City health commissioner Dr. Stephen C. Joseph estimated the total number of infections to be nearly 400,000 in the city. And yet, by 2000, New York had still only logged 120,000 diagnoses.

The fear started on the cover of Life magazine, according to a 2001 story in the New York Times. The headline: ''Now No One Is Safe From AIDS.'' The feds fueled the flames, suggesting that AIDS would wind up being worse than the black plague. Oprah warned that one-fifth of all heterosexuals would be dead by 1990.

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"Masters and Johnson warned that AIDS could lurk on toilet seats," John Tierney wrote in the Times. "A sex therapist, Helen Singer Kaplan, wrote a book, The Real Truth About Women and AIDS, warning that condoms weren't enough and that even kissing was a risk." In a 1986 editorial, Northwestern University's John Phair wrote:

According to a poll published in December by the Los Angeles Times, 50 percent of the adults surveyed supported a quarantine of AIDS patients, 48 percent would approve of identity cards for those who test positive for antibodies to the virus that causes AIDS and 15 percent favored tattooing AIDS victims. Ostracizing and isolating AIDS patients and other infected people, however, would only prevent them from cooperating with researchers openly and honestly. Such trust is essential if AIDS is to be brought under control and eliminated as quickly as possible.

We're not quite there yet, though it's hard not to look at the dude protesting in front of the White House with the "STOP THE FLIGHTS!" and get a similar chill.

Today, HIV paranoia itself persists as an entity unto itself, a powerful phenomenon returning around a half-million hits from a Google search. Mostly it's forums and question/answer sites, featuring posts like "this hiv phobia took over my life.. it ruined me," "need help controlling my HIV paranoia," "HIV risk with a condom. anxiety and paranoid," and the ubiquitous "can't stop thinking about it."

People live in misery over this.

The fear is tied in part to the silence of an HIV infection, clearly. An asymptomatic yet potentially deadly virus is a unique and potent meal for anxiety and compulsion. Ebola goes even a bit beyond, introducing new and relatively general ways of transmission.

With fear is anger and, like HIV, Ebola is seen as linked to a minority population and we all know how that shit goes once it's been bouncing around the brains of a certain segment of creepy Americans for a little while. So most all of the ingredients for full-on horribleness are present and, once they get going, horrible people tend to keep going.