Almost two years ago, Lyndon LaRouche commissioned a study of the collapse of health and lifespan of Baltimore, Maryland's population. The completed study, has now been mimicked by a major feature on the increased rate of AIDS infection in Baltimore, published in two parts in the Baltimore Sun, by medical reporter Jonathan Bor.
During 2005, AIDS spread in that city at the rate of 40.4%--the second-highest rate in the United States, with 1,074 cases per 100,000 population, according to the Baltimore Sun report. At the same time, a new report from the Federal Center for Disease Control has named Baltimore as the number one city in America for rates of the killer MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) infection in 2005, with rates more than twice that of any other area--a whopping 117 cases per 100,000 people.
In the Sun's feature, ironically entitled, "An Epidemic's Unseen Cause," the author attributes the rising rates of both HIV and AIDS infections solely to increased drug use by prostitutes. The claim was supported by interviews, photographs, and stories told by 19 prostitutes, and mapped the HIV/AIDS statistics onto zip codes in Baltimore City, and several surrounding counties. The suggested solution: clean needles; educating women to demand men use condoms, and methadone clinics.
- The LaRouche-commissioned study -
The Baltimore Sun study, wildly incompetant, blames the symptoms of the crisis for the crisis. If the pieces of an exploded planet are flying around like asteroids, only fools would explain it by saying the asteroids caused the explosion. Drug use, prostitution, high disease rates, mental health problems, filthy living conditions, are all symptoms of a collapsed economic structure, which, in the case of Baltimore, was--until the 1970s--an economy built on steel and other productive industry, with good-paying jobs that supported a work force whose living standards were rising, for both African-Americans and white workers, despite racial inequalities.
Lyndon LaRouche, speaking on the epidemiological conditions of populations who do not reach adulthood under a certain level of productivity, said in October 2005, "[When] you have a population of very poor people ... and in very poor conditions; and a high rate of disease ... And when we look through some of the things in this area, and you look at things like HIV and you start to make dots [on a graph-ed.] of the co-factors, in some of these areas, you find that instead of having an area, where you have many dots of co-factors, you've got the whole thing is almost solidly black co-factors: which is the kind of cesspool, in which AIDS spreads fantastically. Because everybody transmits everything to everybody out of this kind of area.
"And usually, the center of this thing, is something like a prison system. You go into the prison system, you'll find the concentration of disease of the populations coming in and out of the prison, in a dynamic model--not your normal statistical model, but a dynamic analysis of this, will show you a process, where you have an area in a city, which has this function. Of people who are in the process of dying, who are all black in terms of dots of disease-sharing, and who often spread AIDS, tuberculosis, and everything else at a high rate, because everybody who kisses everybody, spreads all the diseases.
"Some people are looking for a specific agent: They're not looking at the totality of the problem. They're looking at the disease of poverty! The disease of filth! The disease of terrible conditions!, and every other disease imaginable. And it's all this area. And then, you can find an area, you can demark precisely: It's where the people who are part of this operation live."
