PASADENA, Calif. — Bird flu has killed a few dozen people, grabbed headlines, elicited somber statements and engendered worst-case scenario plans.
In the 25 years since HIV, the AIDS virus, was identified, it has infected 70 million people and killed 22 million. AIDS is the fourth-leading cause of death in the world.
Leave it to PBS's "Frontline" to remind us that we live in a world that's already afflicted with a plague of epic proportions. The two-part, four-hour documentary "The Age of AIDS" (Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 p.m., Ch. 7) is sober and sobering — a wake-up call for the complacency that exists in the United States.
This is not, however, a report about AIDS in America. It travels to 16 countries, tracing the history of what has and has not been done to fight the spread of HIV.
"There's no doubt complacency has settled in in the developed countries, where the complexion of this disease has improved so much that now young gay men in the U.S. think this is not so bad to catch HIV," said Dr. David Ho, the AIDS re-searcher who was Time magazine's 1996 man of the year. "And that obviously is wrong.
"The treatments are quite good. ... Most of us believe that an infected person living in the U.S. with access to antiretroviral therapy could live indefinitely and die of some other disease. But, tragically, while such a dramatic improvement has occurred in the U.S., the rest of the world has continued to suffer and has seen the epidemic get worse. It rages on."
It rages on because other countries are going through what the United States experienced in the 1980s — denial and political leadership that chose to ignore the problem because it was inaccurately believed to be a gay man's disease. (Today, more than half the cases in Africa afflict heterosexual women.)
"We know that every single society will act just as stupid as the last societies have, and they'll be unwilling to talk about sex and they'll be stigmatized," said Dr. Jim Curran, who was a leader of the HIV/AIDS division at the Centers for Disease Control and continues his work at Emory University. "Everyone just repeats it over and over and over again. They're just as dumb in Russia and China as they were in Africa, where they're just as dumb as they were in the U.S."
"Age of AIDS" takes an evenhanded approach to the Reagan administration's notorious inaction, becoming almost apologetic at times. Former HHS secretary Margaret Heckler defends the late president; others take a much harsher line.
"I will give a transcript in the next 10 seconds of all of the speeches (mentioning AIDS) that Reagan gave in his first six years in office," said Curran, who sat silently.
Other world leaders, from former South African President Nelson Mandela to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, express regrets that they didn't handle things differently. Clinton, who has become a crusader in the battle against HIV, is seen on the program saying, "AIDS is a hot political issue in the beginning in a lot of places where people are uncomfortable talking about how it's communicated. Denial only makes it worse, everywhere."
And "The Age of AIDS" makes it difficult to remain in denial. Or maintain an air of complacency.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com