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I'll start with a timeline of events, beginning in 1969-the year before I was dragged into this world screaming and bleeding. In that momentous year, our beloved United States government was very busy. With all that was going on in '69, Dr. Robert MacMahan of the department of defense found the time to request 10 million dollars from congress to develop a synthetic biological agent to which no natural immunity exists. He promised results within 5 to 10 years.
The United States government knows a bargain when it sees one and Dr. Bob got his funding for the synthetic biological agent under House Resolution 15090 in 1970 and soon after, I was born. While I was busy adjusting to this strange new world, the Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick was busy playing around with retroviruses in its super-cool top secret biological weapons facility.
Unfortunately, I was born with a hereditary blood disorder, which made those first few years rather difficult, for me as well as everyone around me. But despite some occasional minor internal bleeding, I made it to my fifth birthday.
That same year, the virus section of Ft. Detrick's Center for Biological Warfare research was renamed the National Cancer Institute. It was there that a "special virus cancer program" was initiated by the U.S. Navy. It was also there that retrovirologists isolated a virus to which no natural immunity exists, they called it HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus). Catchy name - pardon the pun.
Oblivious to all these fascinating goings-on, I entered into the public school system. I quickly mastered the three Rs and laughed and played with my school chums, learned to play the violin, do drawings and clumsily banged away on the piano. Oh those were the days. Meanwhile, back in D.C., Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirmed that 239 populated areas in the U.S. had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San Francisco, Washington D.C, Key West, Minneanapolis and St Louis . In 1978, a kindly family doctor introduced me to my first love, vicoden-sparking a romance with opiates that would last into my late twenties. That same year, experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, began in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically asked for promiscuous homosexual men, since they were most likely at risk of contracting hepatitis. In 1981, the first cases of a strange new desease were confirmed in gay men in, oddly enough, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Gay men donate blood, just like everybody else. And by the time they gave this strange new disease a name, it was already in the blood supply. At the age of 11, I had been using concentrated blood products to treat my hemophilia, for over two years. It was much more convenient than using whole blood or plasma to replace the clotting factor I was missing, but since each dose was concentrated with blood from over 1000 donors, it was kind of risky.
g1bson's Genres: creative non-fiction, nonsense, silliness and foolishness
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