I designed this web site for a course on HIV and AIDS, entitled: HIV Disease, a Human Concern, taught by Dr. Douglass at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, during the summer of 2001.
I hold a bachelor's degree in English (minor Romance languages--from a school that had a really good rate of matching students with careers, part of why I picked it), a master's in applied linguistics and TESL (minor English), a second master's in English education at the University of Central Florida. Also an Ed Specialist's degree.
I have taught all subjects to elementary students and English and ESL to college students and adults. I have also done freelance writing (my poems have been published in several journals), and I have held occasional temporary jobs in restaurants, construction, farming, and technology.
One of my primary early sources on AIDS was Laurrie Garrett's 1994 The Coming Plague which I got on the wait-list for and read in 1995; it is not just about AIDS; it is about the environment and microbes too.
I grew up influenced by parents who were strongly committed to the environment. We were 'rfd' or rural-free delivery for a while and I just love the woods. I really believe that the environment affects our health. I do know people who thrive in cities, but I believe, though they may enjoy the lights, skyline, and 'action' in the towns, that pollution, too much light, and frustrating drives in traffic do affect them, too. (Truthfully, my first visit to a city was when I visited relatives at fourteen; I found the elevator in a large department store the most fascinating thing, and was left there everyday by my aunt while she shopped. I ran all the controls, and once pushed so many buttons that I shut the whole thing down and shut on all the alarms. I was glad when the store came and fixed it. I also really found running up the down escalator fascinating. A few years later, I lived in Chicago. I played hooky a bit in my early high school years though in Chicago I really wanted to get serious. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed taking a day off weekly to ride the subway from one end of the town to another. I brought a book with me, but mostly stared out the windows and jumped back and forth across the tracks so that I could ride all day for one fare. My family was a bit frugal, I guess, because it was my first experience seeing people stop for coffee and danishes along the road and subway routes, and I started trying that too! Today I live no closer to the city than I have to. Unfortunately, the town I grew up in rfd has since been way over-built! This overbuilding is nothing new, though--as you can see from a poem composed in the tenth century in a woman's voice!)
I believe that medicine should be combined with common sense and that people can and should get really active and involved in their own care. I read once that the patients who live longest with HIV have often 'fired' at least one doctor. The patient who listens to his or her body and notes how a medicine is affecting him or her does get good information this way. (One of my favorite pop songs is Nielssen's "Put the Lime in the Coconut"--where the woman "called the doctor, woke him up, said 'Doctor, ain't there nothing I can take . . . ?,'" to which the doctor in the song replies, "'You such a silly woman . . . .'")
In the process of taking graduate courses in reseach methods, I have come both to understand the use of some studies and to recognize that studies can be flawed in many ways, depending on the group studied, its size, and the various factors that might be affecting its members. I feel that the best 'studies' are records collected in the process of monitoring patients' care, but I do believe people might benefit from signing up to participate in 'trials' of things that the people feel might help them. As far as trials go, I do think that when placebos are given, it's unethical not to give people participating in the study a choice of taking the drug or placebo--even though this may affect the outcome of the study (it may affect the outcome of the study for a participant to sit and wonder what he or she is taking, too!). When a medicine shows benefits, this information should always be made available to people, including those involved in the study, during the course of the study--and I note that this is often the case, too.
Like everyone I've often wondered where HIV originated, and I realize we do not know and do not really have a complete record of its progress into a complete epidemic. However, I tend to beliver that it's a mutant of an older virus--one that, like Dr. Jay Levy of ARI has argued, had been around in humans/animals for some time--and that it mutated as a result of a variety of factors, incorporating into it parts of other microbes. I do not think it is particularly African in origin, although I acknowledge that deforestation and povery in Africa could have had some affect on its development. But I think it may have first started to develop in Europe before the second half of the twentieth century.
I first started watching the HIV epidemic in 1982-1983, and I became worried about the plasma sold. I also did everything I could to protect my own cats from getting fiv, the feline immuno-deficiency virus, but one day it just happened--my cat was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess. I did my best to break up the fight, and finally retrieved my cat, brushed his teeth, and looked for cuts, but he still got sick.
I live with my cat Todja, who has feline AIDS, but is doing not too badly at this point! (& of course, I hope for his future!)
Contact Me . . .
C. E. Whitehead may be reached by email at
[email protected]