Apocalypse by choice

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socialist message out to others. Staff: Paul Colvin, Gerry Foley, Hayden Perry, Barbara Putnam Carole Seligman, Kwame M.A. Somburu, Sylvia Weinstein.

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Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of Socialist 2 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1992 In this country, over 150,000 people have already died of AIDS-related diseases. Federal health officials estimate that at least one million Americans are HIV-infected. The number of AIDS cases will almost double in this country alone by 1993.

And now, due to the criminal neglect of the U.S. government, we are in a tuberculosis epidemic with strains so virulent they threaten to return pockets of American society to a time when antibiotics were unknown; to a period more reminiscent of the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

HIV-positive people are most threatened by the resurgence of tuberculosis, which been swift and calamitous in many of our largest cities.

The new TB epidemic By after two decades of searing budget cuts in public health programs. Without these cuts, experts say, the disease could have been all but eradicated, and new, deadly strains would never have been allowed to evolve and flourish.

New York City has 4000 cases of tuberculosis. The last time it had that many cases was in 1967. At that time, the city had more than 1000 beds assigned to TB patients. Today, there are fewer than 75 beds available.

In 1968, there were 22 fulltime chest clinics in New York. Today there are only nine.

And those clinics are so over-crowded and dilapidated that scores of patients must huddle each day in the drab, dimly-lighted corridors as they TEGY await treatment. , The TB epidemic has been kindled by AIDS, homelessness, drug abuse, and the rapid disappearance of preventivemedicine health clinics in cities all across the country.

"I'm scared," said Dr. Lee B. Reichman, who has just become president of the American Lung Association, and who for 30 years has been one of the nation's leading tuberculosis experts.

"Here we are in 1992," Reichman says, "with cure rates lower than countries like Malawi and Nicaragua. We can't keep track of our patients, and all evidence suggests more and more of them have TB that is resistant to our best drugs. We have turned a disease that was completely preventable and curable into one that is neither. We should be ashamed."

Dr. Reichman blames pure and simple "neglect" for this dangerous development. Most Americans put TB out of their minds. It wasn't a problem for them. However, it was never completely eliminated in the poorest parts of cities like Miami, Atlanta, Houston, and New York. In the poorest areas, TB persisted through the Stepp: 3. 12 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

In 1970, for example, TB case rates in central Harlem were nearly 20 times the national average and at least five times higher than the average for New York City.

The disparities have grown worse. Last year, reported case rates in central Harlem soared to 220 per 100,000 residents— 35 times the figure for wealthy residents of the Upper East Side, just a short bus-ride away. It is a disease of the poor and disfranchised.

Beginning in 1953, when the government began keeping TB statistics, the number of cases declined steadily from a high of 84,000 that year, to a low of 22,000 in 1985. By last year, however, there were nearly 27,000 new cases reported in the United States.

The American Lung Association now estimates that without a major effort, the United States, within a decade, will see at least 50,000 new cases every year and they will cost the country billions of dollars a year to treat. TB, unlike AIDS, is easily spread through casual contact with an infected person.

This is nothing more than cold-blooded murder through neglect. This is not like the Name Addre City Stati Zip ACTiON Editors: MICHAEL SCHREIBER JOSEPHRYAN Business Manager: JOSEPH RYAN San Francisco, CA 94110.

are expressed in editorials.

Middle Ages when the plague took millions of lives. Neither the medical nor the scientific information was available to stop that pandemic.

But what hasn't fundamentally changed is the attitude of the ruling class, who foster the belief that those who have contracted AIDS are somehow guilty of sin and are being punished by God. In the Middle Ages, the ruling class spread the same hypocrisy about plague victims. "It is hard not to be bitter about a catastrophe that simply should never have happened," said Dr. Barry R Bloom, a senior researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a TB specialist. "We had everything we needed. All the knowledge, the skills, the medical expertise necessary to eliminate this disease. Instead, this country chose to very nearly eliminate the health care programs people with this disease need most."

This country has the expertise and know-how to find a cure for AIDS and to cure TB.

What is necessary is a massive, unrelenting fight against this corrupt ruling class to force them to end their "apocalypse by choice."

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