For this assignment, I choose to watch How To Survive A Plague directed by David France. The documentary was focused on the aids crisis in the 1980s. The men were introduced to an illness called HIV positive or aids. The majority people who had aids were the gay people when they had sexual interactions with eachother and did not use protection. There were a couple of women who were HIV positive as well but it was to their understanding that their husband were gay.
The documentary was made in a chronology of scenes where in the begining they have in written words saying “1987, world wide deaths 499,998” and as the documentary goes on it continues to put those written words in different years. Many men were dying because of this disease world
The animated documentary shows various forms of victimization: threats and armed attacks against civilians, forced disappearances, bombings of the village and armed battles, child recruitment by the guerrilla, forced displacement, and the subsequent problems of unemployment, poverty and stigmatization in the cities .
Age is just a number, well at least for Stephen Quinn it is. Stephen Quinn is 15 years old, but he does not let his age define who he is. Although Stephen was matured for his age when the plague started, he still had a lot of growing to do. Throughout the novel The Eleventh Plague Stephen is prematurely forced through the journey into adulthood. Stephen had to mentally mature enough to allow himself to open up and trust people. Stephen had to toughen up and become a man and he had to be strong enough to have courage in the worst of times. When he thought it could not get any worse he was hit with something that seemed unsurpassable. He had to suffer the pain of losing his dad to the plague.
It shows him getting on an unsafe boat, and attempting to get to Mexico. I found it interesting that he kept referring to god because he believed that god had also gone on the same journey. This ended up giving him the strength to succeed. Soon after they showed us the Arizona immigration experts whose job is to help find the dead bodies of people who attempted to get to the U.S illegally from Latin American countries. The role of the Arizona immigration group was to find the real identiity of the man they were calling Dayani Cristal. During the documentary they took the viewer through the process of identifying the bodies and how they handle the communication between the U.S.A and the country that the dead person is coming from. A quote I remember hearing is “sadly, many are not identified.” This quote represented the harsh truth of immigration to the U.S.A. The reason they used the man who they identified as Dayani Cristal as an example was because he had a tattoo. When they were attempting to identify Dayani Cristal, they weren’t sure where he came from, or what his actual name was. This is where the Mexican and Honduran consulate came in. First the Immigration experts spoke to the Mexican consulate because this is where the majority of immigrants come from. After they determined that there were no missing Mexican men with his description, they called the Honduran consulate. The fact that they were able to find that the man was from Honduras, was one of the few times that they were able to identify a dead person that attempted to cross the
Carl Zimmer the guest speaker of this broadcast states that in 1981 doctors described for the first time a new disease, a new syndrome which affected mostly homosexual men. The young men in Los Angeles were dying and the number of cases was growing faster and faster. The number of deaths was increasing from eighty to six hundred and twenty five in just the first few months. After the first few cases in LA, AIDS was declared to be one of the deadliest pandemics the world had ever seen after the plague in the Middle Ages.
One important scene in the film ‘The Age of Aids’ is “Port Au Prince, Haiti”. In this scene it outlines the conditions in Haiti, which were very poor and it turn left the city defenseless against the new disease. In 70’s and 80’s the disease began to be seen by doctors and priests who were being sought after to cure a unseen disease which left the people with the “look of death, [making them] so skinny you could see their bones”. The scene then goes on to take a look at one of the first HIV clinics in Port Au Prince, which was opened in the roughest parts of town. One of the surprising things that this clinic found when they were looking at the patients coming in was that the mean they were analyzing had more contact with women then they had with men. This was extremely interesting because this was completely different from what the pattern of the disease had been in the US. The doctors believed this was because homosexual males had been coming into Haiti as tourists and where having sex with locals, who in comparison didn’t call themselves homosexuals because even though they had been having sex with men, the number of women they were having sex with greatly outnumbered the men. This was extremely important because it allowed people to open their eyes, and realize that this was not a homosexual disease, that anyone could get the disease. And that’s exactly what happened within the Haitian community. Within three years the disease had spread across the entire island effects all aspects of society. This scene was effective because it is able to change a viewer with little knowledge of the disease to understand how doctors were able to come to the conclusion that the disease was not in fact a homosexual ...
The Black Death is one of the deadliest epidemics to ever hit mankind. It is estimated that this epidemic killed nearly 30%-60% of the population depending on the location. Recently, scholars have argued over the existence of the Black Death as a Plague in the form of Yersinia Pestis. Many argue, through scientific research and primary sources, that the Black Death was indeed a plague. Their critics argue that there is not enough evidence in the correlation of the scientific research and the primary sources to conclude that the Black Death was really a plague. The primary source The Black Death, by Rosemary Horrox, is a compilation of different accounts of the plague throughout Europe in the 1300’s. The two modern sources Plague Historians
Is it little by surprise that the plague was the most dreaded disease in the Elizabethan era. Death is a terrible thing, especially when a person is getting executed. People died of many diseases in that era. Such as blood poisoning, and the bubonic plague which refers back to black death. It was a very violent disease to get, it was very contagious. The most dreadful punishments in this era were getting hung which lead into executions (Linda Alcin 1) .After you are half dead from getting hung they take you and cut you into squares and hang you up around the city of England .
McNeil suggests, there are still epidemics out there which have not developed human to human status yet. For example, AIDS is identified in 1981, which is after the publication of Plagues and Peoples. Because of AIDS relevancy to this book, McNeil writes a Preface in 1997 including his thoughts on the epidemic. Humans only thought that scientific medicine "had finally won decisive victory over disease germs" (9). With the discovery of the AIDS virus a social change occurred in American and similar societies.
“And the Band Played On” was an HBO movie that illustrated the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s. The movie touched on subjects concerning the reaction of the gay community, the heterosexual community, and the medical community. It showed not only the research in AIDS, but also the way that the US government dealt with it. The movie expressed the consequences the gay community suffered, the plight of the medical community in researching the disease, and the issue of government response to it.
In the movie “And the Band Played On”, illustrated the origin of the AIDS virus, how it was spread across the world quickly. It began with a scene in 1976, Central Africa, shows how the Ebola disease affected a village and was contained before it was spread. This was to show the beginning of another serious disease called AIDS. The world was not prepared to handle such a contagious plague. Doctors treating people with this virus thought that the first cases of the HIV virus was just an abnormality disease. The disease started to spread all over, especially gay men. Throughout the movie, I was able to see different points, such as the beginning of AIDS, the misconceptions it had, and the anguish it brought to the doctors as well as people around the world.
The interesting concept of the absurd hero is classically presented by the author, Albert Camus in many of his novels, including The Plague. An absurd hero is a person who does what he has to do regardless of whether or not he can control that situation. Dr. Rieux, a physician in the plagued town, for example, still performs his job daily and just as diligent as he ever has, instead of caving in to the worry and fear that his town experiences because of this widespread epidemic. Camus uses this concept of the absurd hero to develop the four main characters, Tarrou, Rambert, Grand, but especially Dr. Bernard Rieux.
Spink, Gemma. "AIDS." AVERTing HIV and AIDS. 23 Dec 2009. Web. 11 Jan 2010. .
Albert Camus was a French writer who was very well known all over the world for his different works but especially with the idea of “absurdism”. Camus believed that something that was absurd was not possible by humans or logically. It was beyond ridiculous and therefore impossible. This was the basis of one of his most famous works, The Plague. The Plague is a novel that explores aspects of human nature and condition, destiny, God, and fate. The novel is about a plague that takes place in Oran, Algeria that is fictional, but it’s believed to be relatively based on a cholera outbreak in the mid 1800’s in Oran that killed thousands of people. Dr. Bernard Rieux is the protagonist but also is the narrator. However, he doesn’t admit to being the narrator until the end of the novel. Camus writes in the beginning that the instances in Oran are being told by witnesses of the plague. In The Plague, Camus wants his audience to read the book unbiasedly not knowing the narrator in order to take sides with the characters that one wants to and not to be persuaded by the narrators telling of the events.
The Bubonic Plague, otherwise known as the Black Death was a raging disease. Most people thought of it as the physical Grim Reaper of their town or community. The disease lasted about six years, 1347 to 1352. The Bubonic Plague was a travesty that has traveled throughout Europe and has raged and decimated both large and small towns, putting Europe through a lot.
In the movie And the Band Played On, stakeholders’ interests stymied public health efforts to research and implement health policy to control the rapidly emerging disease, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The stakeholders within the movie, those whose interest would be impacted by policy change, included the affected populations, scientists, state and federal public health officials, and organizations including blood banks. Early in the epidemic, the Center for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were tentative in disclosing vital information – many homosexual men were becoming infected in the bathhouses (Pillsbury, Sanford, & Spottiswoode, 1993). Despite having the supporting evidence of patient zero and a sexual cluster