http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page94?oid=162506&sn=Detail
The above link would take you to a news article. The news article would tell you about how Merck and Co.'s experimental HIV vaccine, called V520, has failed in its trial run. You would click that link, and read about the decade it took to develop the vaccine, and how 45 of the "test subjects" are now infected with HIV as a result.
But you don't need to read the article, because I just explained it to you.
Maybe you will read it, I don't know. Will it make you think? I don't know that either.
If I posted an article about a gruesome bicycle accident, the next time you went for a ride, the thought would flit across your mind:
Should I wear a helmet?
But we don't. We don't put on the helmet. We are 20-something, and we drive too fast around turns, because we're in a rush. Life is moving 1,000 mph, and so are we, and we have no time to wait, and so we take risks. We are invincible.
Why is it HIV is so different from all of the other problems of the world? Its a bullet that could be stopped with a hand. It kills with an inevitable slowness, it is the Alpha and Omega, but it can be prevented with a layer of latex only 0.0018 mm thick.
A vaccine would have been a mixed blessing. Even though it would have prevented millions of deaths, entire countries would have waited years for its availability. The upper class in first world countries would get it within months. And the generation of orphans and infected babies in Brazil, South Africa, India, Costa Rica, China, Russia? Too late for them
I don't mean to sound defeatist. But what I read, what I have seen first hand -- it both gives me hope and heartache. I spend most of my days trying to fight overwhelming odds, to get through insurmountable barriers.
Its exhausting. I hope, every morning, that I'll open the front page and read about a cure. But the day doesn't come. So I work harder that day, and I try to invent my own cure.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment