"Everyone responded with an ordinary pace to an extraordinary situation."

Sorry I've been AWOL - Rosh Hashanah sort of gets in the way of regular blog updates. It was great seeing everyone back home, even if my time spent in transit between Milford and Berkeley sort of killed my soul. As usual, though, the high holidays are a great opportunity to catch up on socializing, sleep, and reading. And keeping that in mind, I feel compelled to recommend an amazing and terrifying book to you all.

A lot of you have probably read And the Band Played On, or at least heard of it. Those of you who were living in the Bay Area during the '80s (shout out to my mother!) likely read the articles that Randy Shilts wrote in the SF Chronicle and later used as the basis for his book. I had never read it before this weekend, though, and so I picked it up with only the understanding that this was a huge book on the history of HIV/AIDS, and since I had some time I might as well give it a try.

And the Band Played On is more than just a comprehensive history of AIDS, though - it is a story of the spread of a killer epidemic because of the failure of an entire society to act. The book serves as a chilling witness to the deaths of hundreds of Americans and as a rebuke of the systems (medical, governmental, communal) that we depend on to protect us from disasters of this proportion.

I grew up in a time when AIDS awareness, education, and prevention was a given. From the first sex ed class I took in sixth grade, the importance of safe sex and the extraordinary dangers that STDs presented were drummed into me. I can't remember a time when I didn't know that AIDS was an epidemic ravaging not just this country but the whole world. To imagine a time before AIDS is difficult, but to think that there was a period of time when people were dying of this disease but no one cared enough to help is almost impossible. And the Band Played On is amazing not only for the incredible act of investigative journalism it represents, but also for its ability to convey to someone like me, who didn't live though those first years of the epidemic, how it was possible for so many people to die before we woke up to the disaster facing our communities.

I haven't finished the book yet (it is enormous), but it's not like I don't know how it ends. I mean, we're all living the epilogue. Shilts was a talented journalist and writer - the book reads like fast paced thriller, all plot and cliffhangers. So much of it is dramatic and disturbing, but two things stand out as particularly upsetting, especially to someone like me who puts so much faith in our democratic system: first, while Shilts repeated again and again that there were many, even countless, reasons why the disease spread so far and so long without any intervention from the medical community, he identified a particularly damning one. The Center for Disease Control (CDC, also happens to be right next door to Emory University) is the nation's first line of defense against any kind of disease or potential epidemic, and while the CDC was one of the first organizations to recognize the danger of AIDS and did their best under the circumstances, they found themselves facing a serious lack of funding. Why? Because the newly elected President Reagan had promised the public smaller government and filled that promise by slashing the CDC's budget in half.

Now, clearly we can't blame Reagan for an entire epidemic, but there is something so utterly tragic about a budget being more important than the health of a nation. Moreover, the naivety of government, to believe that in our modern, civilized society we had no fear of disease and thus no need for a well-developed national response center to them, is astounding.

The second thing that has really hit me while reading And the Band Played On is the response of the medical community to the disease. Shilts wrote about the few doctors who recognized the magnitude of the disease and fought fiercely and often in vain for funding and national attention, but the majority of the medical community was depressingly quick to write the disease off as a "gay issue," one not worthy of their time or energy. They recognized that working on "gay cancer"would gain them little glory or respect, and some of them even felt that maybe the people who were dying were "getting what they deserved." After all, they were living dangerously, engaging in deviant behavior - what did they expect?

Now, my dad was a doctor. My uncle is a doctor. I mean, I'm Jewish. Most of the people I know are doctors. They are all fantastic human beings who do amazing things on a daily basis. THEY SAVE LIVES. And so it is especially scary and terrifying to think that members of the medical profession were out there, looking at this disease, and couldn't see past their own prejudices and self-interest to recognize that what they were facing was the most terrible epidemic of their time. Yes, we all have our own blinders and sore points, things that keep us from seeing clearly. But as someone who thinks that doctors are some of the most important people in our society, it makes me so terribly sad to think of all the death that could have been avoided if more people in the medical profession had managed to look beyond themselves and face reality.

Of course, that has to be said about everyone involved in the crisis. Politicians, community activists, public health officials, friends, lovers, family members - people were either too uninformed, self-centered, prejudiced or scared to think about the wider implications of AIDS, and so instead they buried their heads in the sand and waited for the storm to pass. Part of what makes And the Band Played On such a great book is the expansiveness of it: Shilts covered just about every aspect of the disease, addressing all the different communities it affected and all the types of people who interacted with the virus one way or the other. The book is epic in its scale, and also in its refusal to let anyone off the hook.

Okay, so believe it or not, this wasn't supposed to turn into a long rant about the evils of societal non-action and the dangers of apathy and budget cuts. Rather, I hope that my run-on sentences and internet capslock yelling will persuade those of you who haven't read And the Band Played On to check it out. Despite its age, it is still a highly relevant book.

Sure, we've got a better handle on AIDS than we did in the past, but the disease is by no means defeated. Also, there have been recent reports that in the '90s, AIDS awareness campaigns did such a good job that the numbers of people infected with AIDS dropped dramatically. That drop, coupled with more effective AIDS treatment, made people feel that the disease no longer posed a risk, so they began engaging in unsafe sex and other dangerous activities that have now lead to a marked INCREASE in the incidences of AIDS in this country. Do you see where I'm going with this? Moreover, 25% of all HIV/AIDS diagnoses today occur in women, and women of color account for 75% of those. Clearly, AIDS is still an issue, one that crosses the lines of sexual preference, gender, and race.

Anyway, if you managed to make it this far through my public health screed, good on you. Up next in Shoshana Writes About Depressing Diseases: my long-held irrational fear of the Ebola virus! (Thanks, Isaac, for that one.)