If infection is a choice, no one would pick that option.
But if transmission is a choice, no one would bother.
In the late 50’s stamped the earliest documented case of HIV-1, which was found in blood sample of a man in Kinshasha, Democratic Republic of Congo. Source of infection – indefinite, as the theory of chicken and egg.
Today, over 40 million people (UNAIDS/WHO, 2005) are tagged with the barcode. It is like waking up one morning and realizing that you are stuck with a permanent bad-hair day. Day after day living the same cause, an epitome of Groundhog Day, nothing could help to smoothen it. Even breaking the radio clock won’t help. The only available alternative is an incessant cup of strong coffee that would pump your adrenaline and steer your system, but all is fatal, and eventually irresponsive to the crisis.
Again like the chicken and the egg, in a distinctive approach (an arguable statement), the mother hen lays eggs, some eggs hatch and out come little chicks, as time goes by they grow older, they mate, the female hens lay more eggs, which then hatch and produce a pool of chicks, and with the clock ticking by, the cycle continues.
Now, replace the hen with a female person. It is a simple reproductive and developmental cycle.
Like the chicks, we all age, but not necessarily wiser.
Anything that breathes, stops puffing oxygen someday. But along that line of being alive, shit can happen.
Avian influenza A (H5N1) virus contagiously infected flocks with wings, and gradually domesticated the wings that we put in our mouth. While chicken has that to worry about, we have HIV.
I must have caught the chicken and egg syndrome, as my next line will once more perpetuate in that vicinity. The virus hits the producer and the producer keeps producing. What will happen to the product? Indeed, shit, as bad as it smells.
We moaned for the victims of terrorism and war. We sympathized those lives that taken by natural disasters. We prayed for world peace, hunger, poverty, and global-warming. Yet we never thought of writing down the 3-letter word in our prayer list.
HIV enrolls into the life of an innocent being, who should be blamed? Is that a point necessary to be addressed? If something is irreversible, why attack?
Society in general overlooks the issue, and continually ponders over needless questions and endless pretext. A prolong hibernation. A habit of ignorant. A discriminatory approach. A mindless stigmatization. A person endangered. A person wasted. Are you a person?
If we fear so much of avian virus and take every possible measures to tackle it, while we only fear HIV and not putting any effort in suppressing it. Stopping the spread is not an institutional responsibility, but a joint venture of individuals. Either you infect others or you be infected by others. Thus like a fallacious rumor, it starts from you to make an end, to make it right.
Think of what a single person like you can do to make a difference. It is only a problem when no solution has been thought of. It is only impossibility when no trail and error has been executed. It is only others’ responsibility when no you has been born. If you are reading this, assuming you were once born, and breathing, and alive, and Boleh!, then it is your responsibility too. Sure, responsibility can be shitty at times, but as long as you are living, you continue to shit, and a smart move is to clean up your own shit.
**Article published in the paper this week, quite satisfied with myself with the work.
