Potential victims who refuse to be tested for the disease and then defend their right to remain ignorant about whether they carry the virus are entitled to that fight. But ignorance cannot be used to rationalize irresponsibility. Nowhere in their argument is their concern about how such ignorance might ener public health by exposing others to the virus.
All disease is an outrage, and disease that affects the young and healthy seems particularly outrageous. When a disease selectively attacks the socially disadvantaged, such as homouals and drug abusers, it seems an injustice beyond rationalization. Such is the case with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Decent people are offended by this unfairness and in the name of benevolence have been driven to do morally irresponsible things such as denying the unpleasant facts of the disease, out of compassion for the victims. We cannot distort the facts to comfort the afflicted when such confusion compounds the tragedy.
Some crucial facts: is a communicable disease. The percentage of those infected with the virus who will ually contract the disease is unknown, but that percentage rises with each new estimate. The disease so far has been 100 potential. The latency period between the time the virus is acquired and the disease develops is also unknown.
We now have teats for the presence of the virus that is as efficient and reliable as almost any diagnostic test in medicine. An individual who tests positive can be presumed with near-certainty to carry the virus, whether he has the disease or not.
To state that the test for is "ambiguous", as a clergyman recently in public, is a misstatement and an immoral act. To state that the test does not directly indicate the presence of the virus is a half-truth that misleads and an immoral act. The test correlates so consistently with the presence of the virus in bacteria cultures as to be considered I00 percent certain by experts.
Everyone who tests positive must understand that he is a potential vector for the virus and has a moral duty and responsibility to pr others from contamination. We are not just dealing with the protection of the innocent but with an essential step to contain the spread of an epidemic as horrible as any that has befallen modern man. We must do everything in our power to keep this still, untreatable disease from becoming pandemic.
It may seem unfair to burden the tragic victims with concern for the welfare of others. But moral responsibility is not a luxury of the fortunate, and evil actions committed in despair cannot be condemned out of pity. It is morally wrong for a healthy individual who tests positive for to be involved with anyone except under the strict precautions now defined as safe .
It is morally wrong for someone in a high-risk population who refuses to test himself to do other than to assume that he tests positive. It is morally wrong for those who, out of sympathy for the heartbreaking victims of this epidemic, as though well wishing and platitudes(老生常谈) about the ambiguities of the disease are necessary in order to comfort the victims while ’they contribute to enlarging the number of those victims. Moral responsibility is the burden of the sick as well as the healthy.
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