Deathstyles of the rich and famous
There are diseases of poverty, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. There are diseases of affluence, such as lung cancer, high blood pressure, and type-2 diabetes. And then there are the hazards of extreme affluence, such as being thrown off a polo pony, flipping your Cigarette boat, or succumbing to altitude sickness on a vanity expedition to the Himalayas.
This point was brought home this week with the presumed death by drowning of Philip Merrill, the mid-Atlantic press baron who owns Washingtonian magazine. The 72-year-old Merrill was sailing alone on his 41-foot boat, probably without a life jacket, when he fell into the Chesapeake Bay. I mean no disrespect to Merrill or his family when I say that the risk of meeting this sort of end goes into the small but poetic category of problems unique to the rich and famous. Members of the middle class do not have to worry about falling off $250,000 sailboats because they don’t have $250,000 sailboats to fall off of.
If you survive paycheck-to-paycheck, you can also rest easy about dying while fleeing paparazzi (Princess Diana); at the hand of a servant jealous of your other servants (Edmund Safra); at the hand of the president of your fan club (Selena); at the hand of a lunatic stalker (John Lennon); at the hand of an impatient heir (the royal family of Nepal); from a face lift (Olivia Goldsmith); in your Porsche, while drag racing (basketball player Bobby Phills); in pursuit of a speed-boat record (Stefano Casiraghi, husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco); while diving off your yacht (Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys); after fighting with Christopher Walken (Natalie Wood); while trying to buzz Ozzy Osbourne’s tour bus (Randy Rhoads); from injuries sustained in a cross-country riding event* (Christopher Reeve); in staged violence on a film set (Brandon Lee); as a former vice president, atop your mistress (Nelson Rockefeller); or of a disease that subsequently gets named after you (Lou Gehrig).
I heard a Hollywood doctor say that famous and rich people often get WORSE healthcare because they only know how to manipulate and boss people and not obey them… and this extends to their doctors.
If Rush Limbaugh says he needed 100 oxycontins a day for his back pain, dang-it, he’s gonna get it!
I have a contention, that Aids/HIV, is NOT a poor mans death…
How do you THINK it got over here??
Some White Wild RICH girl/Boy went over to the infected area, and had relations with someone in another country. spread it among her/his Sexual PEERS, and passed it along.
Rush Limbaugh, is an idiot.
Neal safestein
HIV/AIDS got here in the person of an Air France Stewerd who contracted it in Africa…..he wasn’t wealthy…or lucky.
The world’s getting overpopulated anyway, the more people that die, especially in the wealthier societies, the better.
Blame the Catholics (Mexico City is a good example of what happens when the overall populace doesn’t use birth control), religious fundamentalists, ignorant people (usually brown people of some kind) humping too much without pulling out, parents letting their teens “just be teenagers”, etc….
Sorry, some people might be offended by that. You’re probably part of the problem — be part of the solution, PULL OUT!!!
Hump on!
VERY good 5…LOVe it…
4, PROVE IT… you REALLY think they can go back to 1 person, after 10 years of SAYING NOTHING???
FUB, you are passing the BUCK to someone that STILL made more then I did. AND you cant SAY, ‘HE was the FIRST to die, so HE DID IT’
GOD, thats Spit.
I might as well say….that DIGGING up bodies from the PAST, with incubated VIRUS, caused the WHOLE THING….
PICKINg one GAY blade in the sky…dont MEAN it was the ONLY occurrances….
Might as well, send a blind MAN into a room(he never been in) and TELL him, DONT BUMP nothering, it go BOOM.
From Avert.org:
Much was made in the early years of the epidemic of a so-called ‘Patient Zero’ who was the basis of a complex “transmission scenario” compiled by Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the Centre for Disease Control in the US. This epidemiological study showed how ‘Patient O’ (mistakenly identified in the press as ‘Patient Zero’) had given HIV to multiple partners, who then in turn transmitted it to others and rapidly spread the virus to locations all over the world. A journalist, Randy Shilts, subsequently wrote an article based on Darrow’s findings, which named Patient Zero as a gay Canadian flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas. For several years, Dugas was vilified as a ‘mass spreader’ of HIV and the original source of the HIV epidemic among gay men. However, four years after the publication of Shilts’ article, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting its methods were flawed and that Shilts’ had misrepresented its conclusions.
While Gaetan Dugas was a real person who did eventually die of AIDS, the Patient Zero story was not much more than myth and scaremongering. HIV in the US was to a large degree initially spread by gay men, but this occurred on a huge scale over many years, probably a long time before Dugas even began to travel.
Patient 0, has to be found QUICKLY. IF at all, and 10 years after the fact is ALOT to late. And really isnt a concern. Its an epidemic, NOW.
If they could have found such a person or PERSONS, as it can not be said to, MAYBE, be 1 person, and quarentine them, as well as those partners, THEN, it may have been held.
This would be like finding Tyhoid Mary 10 years after infection. EVEN 5 would have spread to fast.
I will repeat something, I have said in the posts, from the past.
It has amazed me to find out, that around 30% of the kids in my area are STD infected.
When I was younger, the Military had placed free clinics ALL over the place, and you could get checkups FREE, and easy…Where are they now?? Its coming to a point, when EVERYONE will need to be checked, and that ISNT a good thing. But, it may be needed. I DONT want a syphlitic president running this country.
IF they had only jumped IN with clinics and quick scare tactics BACK THEN… It may have been slowed to a crawl, and not rampant threw out the world.
#5:
Are you a white supremacist? ’cause you sound like one.
Mother Nature wins in the end, one way or another. Everyone dies, one way or another, happy or not, rich or poor, old or young.
So consider……Poverty, high birth rates, lack of protected sex leads to higher death rates/disease rates from diseases that get harder to treat and control. As technology allows us to delay death in some areas, good old Mom Nat. evens the scales elsewhere. Unpleasantly. On another front, we have an unhappy segment of many populations with the desire to settle down, be faithful to one partner, develope a socially and spiritually satisfying life, who are denied the opportunity. This segment of the population could be one of Moms solutions to the population explosion, and a much kinder one than disease or war, but many societies would rather see them as some type of third or fouth class citizens without the same rights as other families.
Are some of us just afraid to lose a scapegoat?? jh
#6….ECA…..you’re an idiot.
The scientific teams that have studied AIDS/HIV have traced the original cases in THIS country to one man…it’s a fact…..try looking it up.
The disease was already going on in Africa. They have even traced, where they are 90% sure, the area of Africa where it started….in the Camaroons. It’s from Monkeys, and it was transported to humans from either blood of an infected monkey or from natives that ate monkey brains, a common dish in areas where food may be scarce due to famine.
According to you….everyone makes more money than you, so I guess I’m not surprised you think a flight attendent is rich.
And no where did I say he was the FIRST to die……he was the man who brought it to the States.
But, he didnt have to be the ONLY infectious person to bring it over.
There could have been 2,3,4,5, more persons that Brought the infection into the other countries, including our, theres, and others.
As to flight attendants, My max wages were $14,000 per year as a cashier,/Clerk Journeyman in 1993 and in 85 it was about $2.35. Tell me he made less.
the debate is on the IDEA, that the poor in this nation suffer MORE then the rich from HIV/AIDS. Or just tell it to Rock Hudson.
first….apology to ECA for being rude.
Second…I didn’t know that the patient 0 scenerio was disavowed. But I just read the *camaroons* article in the science section of the Times of London just last week uncle dave.