Why was HIV/AIDS created, and what's coming next?

Diseases, what do I know about those? As much as the next person, I guess. I am intimately familiar with the ones I have been down with, those people close to me have fallen a victim to, and the ones that make the news or I read about for one reason or another. I don’t even remember what the six killer diseases are from primary. Are they still the same or do they have mannerisms like the Ugandan districts?

The disease I am especially freaked out about is pneumonia. I have some strange premonition that it is the one that will take me out eventually. I will go to some country that has winter without preparing adequately, as is my habit, and that pneumonia guy will KO me. I hope I’m wrong. I’d rather prefer to go out in my sleep, or even better, to have an orgasm so powerful it closes me.

Where were we? Ah, yes, illness. Let me see, what else do I know? Most ordinary diseases are curable if treated in time. Better still, with application of the right evasion techniques, they can be prevented. If the prevent-or-treat-early formula is engaged, the death toll from health-related matters should drastically reduce. It sounds straightforward but, as with most things that involve humans, it’s never that straightforward. I don’t think anything I type here will change that so I’ll leave that to the doctors and muse about the evolution of disease and why they even exist in the first place.

Every adult knows about AIDS/HIV, I hope. I’m sure every person in Uganda knows someone that has died from it, especially in the 90’s when it was taking down people left down and centre. Again, I won’t be going down into the nitty-gritty of this, not because I don’t care about it, but because there are people more knowledgeable that have written about it. My go to post about STI’s and STD’s is,  ‘Your Honest-to-God Guide to STDS’ by Mark Manson so read that and educate yourself. I, on the other hand, I’m going to proceed with philosophising about sexually transmitted disease.

I must have read somewhere, or dreamt it up, that diseases are Mother Nature’s way of population control. I often wonder what humans would be like if STI’s didn’t exist. Would we be like animals, shagging everyone without fear or favour? But then, we are an evolved species, no?  We invent things, have social lives, recognise family and have put in place all these rules to guide us on what is right or wrong. If you are a believer in the scriptures, you’d probably say that this is something we got from God when we were chased from Eden. But the time we were able to get expelled from that garden, even when we were supposedly innocent, you have wonder about the wiring of humans. Yes, the devil in form of a snake might have done the convincing, but he exploited a certain flaw in our beings and that’s why we took that bite, no? I mean, if the creator had actually made us in his image and what not, you’d think we’d have had the same good wisdom to follow a very simple instruction like do not eat from that one single tree, no?

Moving on, we have Sodom and Gomorrah. Two cities I think represent how messed up humanity is capable of being if left unchecked. If you were to compare us to other animals, yes, we can get as nasty as them, but they have nothing on our wanton capabilities. Animals get to sleep with their own blood. You see a young bull mounting its own mum and we think to ourselves, look at these uncouth creatures. Some evolution biology I read informed me the reason humans don’t sleep with their own relatives is because that results in weaker specimens. Despite this fact, we’ve still had incidences of people sleeping with their own family and some even producing kids with them (Game of Thrones anyone?). Some tribes even allow within family copulation, to a certain extent. Cousins are allowed. I always wonder how that happened. Probably the ruler of that tribe, after his advisors had come to him telling him about how the children of families that were closely intermarried were showing signs of weakness in health and on the battlefield, must have looked at his hot cousin who he had been planning to marry and then made the decree, no more sleeping with family members, apart from cuzos…cuzos are ok. And yes, I’m insinuating that before that, we used to sleep with family. This I believe is so because, whichever evolution theory you believe in, there must have been a lot of incest taking place to ensure that the species multiplied and spread out. So technically speaking, we must all be related and the family thing is just a case of where do we draw the line

So somewhere along the way, love was introduced. I could be wrong but I don’t think other animals have love. The male fertilises, the female takes care of the young ones and the male acts as a bodyguard, if he sticks around anyway. Sex or whatever other forms it takes is meant to ensure continuity of the species. Have you heard of those creatures that eat the male after his purpose is served, or those ones where the males die off after fertilising? But us humans, we have love. Feelings. And in the absence of this, we are able to have sex for fun. Sex is pleasurable. I wonder which other animals do this, have sex for pleasure. I think this is where things got complicated for humans. Sex for pleasure, with feelings/love thrown in there to make it more interesting. The powers that be in the clouds must be highly entertained by all of this. I wish I was their supplier of popcorn. I’d be making profits like a problem.

What I think helps us keep sex for pleasure in check and prevent us from sinking back into Sodom and Gomorrah ways is a combination of pregnancy and capitalism. Raising kids isn’t cheap. That’s why most people don’t go sexing everyone without thinking of the consequences. So we created contraceptives for that. To allow us have sex for pleasure without worrying about taking care of a dozen kids and having to take breaks from pleasurable sex when the woman is pregnant or recovering from pregnancy. Tell yourself what you want about contraceptives being for family planning and what not, they are just there to ensure we can have sex without consequences. Or maybe that’s the same thing. The only consequence we have to deal with is feelings, which can make things complicated.

When you mix sex for pleasure with our hedonistic tendencies and faulty wiring that leads us to throw caution to the wind and live in the moment, we have a recipe for a repeat of Sodom and Gomorrah. And we don’t want that, right? If you think about it without the filter of all this etiquette we’ve learnt over the years, it doesn’t sound like such a bad place to be. Sex, corruption, crime, booze, other drugs, indulgence, even more indulgence…but, it isn’t a sustainable model for the continuity of the species, and the planet. Rules are required. Sensible rules, because I’m sure even those two cities had some kind of rules system, no matter how flexible. In a scenario like that one, pregnancy, planned or unplanned, isn’t a means enough to keep humans in line. Mother Nature realising this decided to throw in STI’s/STD’s. That way, we had to be cautious. No sleeping around fwaaa. Our self-preservation instincts and the survival for the fittest mantra dictates that we shun those who are capable of infecting us and making us one of the weak. But we as humans are evolved, remember. So we manufactured the drugs that treat some of the STI’s and went go about our business of having sex for pleasure, albeit with less fervour. So Mother Nature decides to throw us something more severe…here, have, take this HIV/AIDS, and good luck with getting a cure. And boy or boy did it work wonders. That was a major slap of reality for humanity. The search for a cure still exists and humanity is much tamer than it was before.

But with condoms, people are still able to sex infected people and with the campaigns against discrimination, these people are now able to leave in society without being marginalised. Had we been like other animals, HIV people would have been kicked out into the wilderness to die from there alone. But we are not, and so we’ve found ways of living happily with infected people. Good for us, right? I mean, it’s sad that of recent, an increasing number of people are more afraid of unplanned pregnancies than they are of STD’s. Someone on social media was complaining about how a couple will be more afraid if the guy came in the girl than if either of them is sick. Capitalism and pregnancy are the taking over again.

But with all these measures in place to make sure that HIV people infected can live long happy lives with the same benefits as non-infected people, one can’t help but wonder if mother nature is not about to throw another curve ball our way in form of a more advanced sexually transmitted disease. Let’s just hope I am as crappy a prophet of doom as I am a researcher.