Excellent documentary on Netflix

leggo

Fascinating doc about AIDS, and grass roots efforts to speed up treatments to change it from a death sentence to a manageable condition. Really made me question why the same isn't happening for cancer....even more so than usual. Very thought-provoking. Give it a watch. It's called "How to survive a plague".

chef127

We know that profits from treating cancer is tooooooooooooo much to give up!

Curing cancer would raise the unemployment rate.

new_direction

thanks for the suggestion. Saw the trailer on youtube and it looks very interesting.

new_direction

'..And I've always been painfully aware that in order for me to beat this virus and live I will need a great deal of help from all of you. Can we all before it's too late begin to understand each other? Will we realise that we share similar motivations?...However from your side we're being constantly told to butt out. On my side the level of anger and frustration is reaching such a point that attitudes claiming you're all uncaring and in it for greed are now widespread. While at times we may offend you remember as well that like you ACT UP has succeeded in prolonging the lives of thousands of people living with HIV disease'  international AIDS conference, Peter Staley
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YwAoHdv4yQ)

'You could see a substantial drop in virus load. So that was the first week. The second week was very disappoiting because what we saw in the second week was in fact the virus load coming back up again. ONE EXCEPTION! If it can happen in one then by definition it can happen in everyone you just need to figure out how to do it!' Emilio Emini

'93 to 95 were the worst years. It was a really terrifying time. They were the worst years. And then we got lucky' David Barr

'...so many good people... and like in a war you wonder why you came home'

'to be that threatened with extinction and to not lay down but instead to stand up and fight back' Peter Staley

'I feel very fortunate. And there's probably a lot of complicated reasons why but I still find it very difficult to plan for the future and or accept that I will have a long life which is unfortunate because I've had a long life and I've been living with AIDS for 20 years...'Gregg Bordowitz

gonegirl

The gay community was very cohesive on this issue. AIDS was killing many and nothing was done. At the same time Legionnaires Disease killed 100 and the government pulled out the stops.



Breast cancer has had a great deal of advocacy behind it, hence the increased funding. But still, the fact that 30% will become metastatic has been swept under the rug, with the over 90% of funding going toward prevention.



We need a group like ACT Up that would act out AIDS deaths in governmental meetings and public settings. But more, we need the strength of political lobbying to push for research dollars into metastatic disease.



I will definitely watch the documentary.

Moderators

There's more about the film, where to see it, and trailers that can be view ed online at the How to Survive a Plague website.

leggo

I fear that somewhere along the line, breast cancer has turned into a bad joke. I mean pink garbage cans, mixers, guns???? Personally, I think there's no recovering from this marketing nightmare. Hopefully, I'm wrong. I don't even no where to begin to place blame, but i do know I'm mad as hell that it was allowed to happen. Thank gawd AIDS was treated as the deadly disease it is and not a marketing opportunity.

gonegirl

Gay men have better taste than to buy pink crap. :-)

leggo

Isn't that the truth! They got it right...."cure this....or else". Yet here we sit, dying of bc. It's embarassing really. I know that the one thing that threw me over the edge was when I had started Herceptin years ago. The literature that was given to me came in a nice pink booklet, with a nice pink pen to make notes. The nurse was almost ashamed to give it to me and I instantly wanted to burn the place to the ground. When pharmaceutical companies are "pinking it up", we're in serious trouble.