For many years during the height of the AIDS crisis, I was an employee of a major hospital system as an HIV/AIDS prevention education counselor for nine counties in Maine. My work was funded by the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On a global scale, however, my work was minuscule among the frantic world efforts to understand this inscrutable disease that was ending lives, seemingly at random, but most widely among heterosexual populations. Only immoral, arrogant fanaticism led us to believe otherwise.

While many of my friends and loved ones were dying, I witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS on our population, and later, the monumental results of funding that would stem its spread.

Tens of millions of lives were lost all over the world. Thankfully, more millions were and are being saved. We were baffled then, but now ignorance is culpable.

Ceasing funding for global AIDS prevention, education and treatment, as is being proposed, is not merely inhumane. It is immensely ignorant of the most basic understanding of the disease and its risks to all humanity that continue to this day.

Wherever the source of COVID, we have vividly seen that viruses do not know borders. Viruses do not yield to politics, though politics now threatens to make victims of us all.

We must not be led to believe that this does not affect each of us, that it’s them “over there.” I would like to believe that most Americans know this, but we are being held hostage by the colossal ignorance, arrogance and egos that do not know this. Or refuse to know this. Or do know this, and don’t care.

Some facts may not be widely known about AIDS. This disease is especially dangerous because an infected person may be asymptomatic for years, during which time it becomes increasingly life-threatening and difficult, then impossible, to treat. Meanwhile, the victims, unaware that they are communicable, continue to spread the virus, and the calamitous effects multiply exponentially throughout humankind.

What is perhaps less well known is how readily the virus, left untreated, mutates. Over decades, the medical community has been successful in studying and addressing its mutations. Though there is no cure and no vaccine yet, early treatment has stemmed the effects of AIDS throughout the world. Stopping funding, research, prevention, education and treatment that has been proposed will result in new, inscrutable mutations, and irrefutably will end lives “over there,” and here.

With the treacherous disease of AIDS, there is no “there” there. Damn politics. We must stop playing party politics now or return to 1981, when we were young, terrified, naïve and dying.

Lew Alessio is retired from several careers. He lives in Greene with his husband, Jim Shaffer.