I remember when this was cool -

[kyburg]

There also was a certain ettiquette about pinning your ribbon, as I recall.

If you had lost someone to AIDS, you were to pin your ribbon with something that had wings - to denote that your loved one had "flown away" due to AIDS.

I've worn a ton of red ribbons.

Hopefully, we've learned enough about treating viruses from AIDS to survive the bird flu that's coming - just google it up. It's too depressing. Right now, it's strictly animal to human transmission, with the exception of one case. CDC thinks that if it mutates enough to go person to person, it could cause up to one billion dead - in less than a span of weeks.

Go kick the dirty homos who's fault this is - go ahead. I'm getting some Tamilflu and a year's supply of canned goods.

Comments

[caitlin.livejournal.com]

I like the icon...

ANd, yes, there are worse things than AIDS out there.

And AIDS is not a 'gay' disease.

*shrug*

C.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

I second both of those. One of the people I grew up with (a gal who lived across the street) was diagnosed just before she gave birth to her son.

[littleamerica.livejournal.com]

You're the only person I've seen use the one billion number. The links I've seen have numbers in the fifty to one hundred million range [1]. Granted, that's still a mind-bending number, but there's a big difference between a hundred million and a billion if you're part of the other nine hundred million.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/29/news/flu.html

It's got to make that hop from being transmissable only by bird to human, to being transmissable human to human to be that billion case deadly...

Still, it's pretty scary.

[littleamerica.livejournal.com]

I wonder how solid that number is. It's an extrapolation of an estimate based on a characteristic of a currently non-existent mutant virus.

I rather doubt that it's possible to estimate the deadliness of a virus that hasn't arisen yet. I suppose someone could estimate on the basis of prior host jumps, but I'd expect the numbers to be soft.