AIDS and Syphilis

The briefest description I could come up with to describe this illness is a cross between AIDS and syphilis. Not that I really have any idea what those diseases are like. In fact, my primary care doctor must have thought my symptoms were so suggestive of AIDS and syphilis that he had me tested for those diseases. I suppose, with the fatigue, history of a rash, psychiatric symptoms, and other weird things. Sometime, I kind of want to ask him, um... how likely is it for a person who hasn't um... you know... to get syphilis? Since primary care doctors get that kind of information in the first five minutes of a patient meeting them. So he thought it could have been an infectious disease, until the couple of tests he ordered came back negative. Hm... is that the extent of possibility? There's always a time in history before the cause of a disease is identified.

Slightly more descriptively, mentally, it's kind of like being a little bit retarded, a little bit autistic, a little bit schizo, depressed, bipolar, with attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder coming out of nowhere, and a little bit epileptic. Add in a little movement disorder. And the fatigue is kind of like running a marathon and then climbing Mount Everest while having a bad flu. And the fibromyalgia symptoms, hard to describe, but chronic pain is worse than any cut, bruise, cramp, sprain, headache I've ever had.

***

So there are AIDS conspiracy theories, actually they're more like accident theories. They're actually quite plausible, like contaminated vaccine programs in Africa. What is difficult for people to wrap their minds around is that it's possible to be responsible for such huge disasters. There are people who deny the Holocaust occurred, or that global warming is really a danger.

I was contemplating the plausibility of such accident theories, and then this graph from Wikipedia popped in my head:

Who knows how much of that is really due to AIDS or how accurate it is, but the graph is quite impressive. I think it takes an even wilder imagination to imagine that AIDS suddenly appeared out of nowhere across multiple countries in Africa on such a large scale. They must have had a whole lot of monkey-hunting accidents, and be sleeping around on some order of magnitude beyond imagination to make it spread that quickly to such a large percentage of the population.