Chicago Free Press Editorial: We’re all adults here

Chicago Free Press Editorial: We’re all adults here
Copyright by The Chicago Free Press
May 20, 2009
http://www.chicagofreepress.com/node/3510


President Obama last week announced that Dr. Thomas Frieden will be leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Frieden, who for seven years has headed up New York City’s health department for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has received both accolades and criticism for how he gets things done.

Many people love that Frieden is willing to take seriously health risks caused by smoking and unhealthy foods, for example. He raised the ire of numerous citizens and businesses when he pushed through bans on smoking in bars and trans fat foods in restaurants. Back in 2002 he famously said that chronic illnesses were just as potentially devastating to New Yorkers as terrorist attacks.

But Frieden’s means for getting things done have struck some people, especially community AIDS activists and advocates, as heavy-handed.

Many activists object to Frieden’s pushing for dropping the consent requirements attached to HIV testing in New York state—patients there must give written consent and have counseling beforehand. Frieden has said that such requirements put up numerous barriers to people being tested, but he so far has been unable to get the state legislature to put the changes through.

He made what seemed to be his most major blunder in 2005, however, when his agency announced that a New York City AIDS patient, a gay man, was possibly infected with a “superstrain” of the HIV virus that was both unresponsive to medication and gestated from infection to full-blown AIDS in just 8 weeks.

The man supposedly had sex with numerous men during a crystal meth binge. In a statement at the time, Frieden called the case “a wake-up call to men who have sex with men, particularly those who may use crystal methamphetamine. Not only are we seeing syphilis and a rare sexually transmitted disease—lymphogranuloma venereum— among these men, now we’ve identified this strain of HIV that is difficult or impossible to treat and which appears to progress rapidly to AIDS.”

The media picked up the story and sensationalized it to the hilt. But in the end no new cases of the superstrain were reported.

The choice of Frieden makes apparent that Obama is taking public health seriously, and for that we applaud him. The president has made clear that a strengthened CDCP will play an integral part of a revamped health care system.

But we also have to put up a red flag to ensure that the GLBT community is being treated seriously and not infantilized in the eyes of the federal government. Frieden’s reporting of the superstrain patient only served to perpetuate myths about promiscuous and drug-addled gay men. When our community needs help or attention from the government, it does not have to be rendered with unfair, not to mention public, judgment. Hopefully Frieden and President Obama will keep that in mind.