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Jehovah’s Standards Help UsThe Watchtower—1983 | June 15
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Help From God’s Safe and Sure Guidelines
12, 13. How does a recent health development bear on God’s standards of sexual morality?
12 We can receive help from God’s standards in many direct, physical ways. For example, The New York Times Magazine (February 6, 1983) reported on a new disease that ‘medical detectives are calling the century’s most virulent epidemic.’ It is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (acronym: AIDS). This disease brings on the collapse of a person’s immune system, leaving him prey to rare forms of cancer (Kaposi’s sarcoma), pneumonia and other bizarre illnesses. How deadly is AIDS? The two-year death rate is said to be over 65 percent.
13 Scientists believe that AIDS is spread through bodily secretions (particularly semen) and blood. So far mostly homosexuals have contracted it by their promiscuous immorality, though it has spread to heterosexual partners. One “gay” confessed: “It’s like being in wartime. We don’t know when the bomb is going to fall. I’ve had 18 friends die in the last year and a half from AIDS. Another 12 are now seriously ill.” The article said: “As they waste away, many AIDS patients begin to reflect on their lives, sometimes feeling they are being punished for their reckless, hedonistic ways.” Unquestionably, God’s moral standards, such as those mentioned at 1 Corinthians 6:9, 10, help us. They protect us!
14. In what other ways does the AIDS problem underscore God’s standards? (Deuteronomy 12:23-25)
14 There is more to it. AIDS has been found in many persons from the Caribbean. Dr. Sheldon Landesman explained: ‘We know that our patients often are involved in voodoo and spiritualism.’ Apparently AIDS is transmitted in their rituals. The disease is also linked to blood transfusions and blood products. “AIDS has become the second leading cause of death—after uncontrollable bleeding—in hemophiliacs, and, most recently, a number of surgical patients who have received blood transfusions have contracted AIDS, raising fears among some observers about the nation’s blood supply.” The incubation period seems to range from six months to two years. So by the time some realize that they have AIDS they “might have unknowingly infected hundreds more individuals—through sexual contact, through blood donations, or through some yet unimagined route.” God’s standards regarding sexual morality, avoiding spiritism and ‘abstaining from blood’ help us keep free of this and other diseases.—Deuteronomy 18:10-12; Proverbs 5:18-23; Acts 15:29; 21:25.
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Jehovah’s Standards Help UsThe Watchtower—1983 | June 15
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[Box on page 13]
AIDS—Epidemic of the 1980’s
“Almost three-fourths of the people who first got the disease are dead. Some researchers believe that no one survives it.” The disease is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.—Science 83, March.
One doctor observed: “It is like a machine. Once it starts, you know there is no stopping it. You can watch the immunity system deteriorating. You’ll just be finishing up with one infection, and another will pop up. The patient will have pneumonia, then herpes, then fungus in the brain, then a virus attacking the colon.” One of his patients was a semiprofessional boxer and tennis player who also lifted weights. This man “had a steady girlfriend and had had only one homosexual encounter six months before he was stricken.” What happened to him? “The man died six weeks after the disease was diagnosed, of a perforated intestine, at the age of 30.”
What is being done to learn the who, what, when and where of AIDS? The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is located in Atlanta, Georgia. On February 13, 1983, a leading Atlanta newspaper reported: “Never has the CDC assigned more workers—about 100 so far—for so long to a public health problem. The group’s work is one of the most sustained, intense medical detective efforts in history . . . With the idea that they are looking for a virus—and not even that is certain—the CDC scientists are trying to grow the germ in animals or test tubes.” But since AIDS may have an incubation period of from six months to two years, tests run now may not reveal anything before 1985. At present, CDC virologists and microbiologists “feel they are no closer to discovering the agent [causing AIDS] than when they started their search more than a year ago.”
In January the CDC held a conference to discuss AIDS. As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. D. Armstrong of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center told the conference: “I have absolutely no doubt that AIDS is transmitted by sex and blood products.” Science 83 expressed the general view: “Scientists think it is passed by ‘intimate contact’—shared drug needles, for example, or sexual intercourse. Which points to something carried by the bloodstream. Which has a lot of health officials worried about the millions of people who give and receive blood.”
Currently there are no tests to detect persons with AIDS, so blood banks cannot determine which donors have the disease. It has been suggested that donations not be accepted from high-risk groups, particularly homosexuals. But “gays” have reacted with cries of discrimination and violated rights. (Who worries about the rights of the persons given such blood?) Furthermore, a representative of the National Gay Task Force told the CDC meeting: “Many gays don’t self-identify as such and won’t respond to the questionnaire.” Similar protests were heard in South Africa when screening was suggested after the death of two male crew members of South African Airways.
The latest evidence is that women who have had sexual relations with men having AIDS can contract the disease. Another new group of victims are children. Some infants evidently became victims after receiving blood transfusions and fractions given to treat an Rh problem after birth. Other babies may have contracted it in the womb or picked it up from intimate contact with a parent or other AIDS victim.
Since the number of reported cases has been doubling every six months, we surely will be hearing much more about this horrible epidemic of the 1980’s.—Galatians 6:7, 8.
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