Putting Men to the Test
Is it funny that women are the focus of most testing for communicable diseases? When it comes to some communicable diseases, the medical community has not even developed an effective test for men. Unfortunately, testing women, and not men, for many diseases tends to perpetuate ignorance about these diseases. It is not infrequent to hear someone refer to a woman as “dirty” or immoral because she tested positive for a communicable disease.
However, in a world where men carry diseases but are unlikely to be tested for them, and women are not only regularly tested but in some cases required to be tested for the diseases, who is the “dirty” one? In a world where the fastest growing demographic worldwide for new HIV infections is heterosexual women of color—frequently women who believe that they are carrying on a monogamous relationship, who is immoral?
And why is it that there is such an emphasis on testing women, but no similar push to test men?
If I were an optimistic person, I would argue that women are tested because women suffer the symptoms of communicable diseases more severely than men. In fact, some communicable diseases cause no known symptoms or adverse effects in men at all. By testing women, you get right to the person who most needs treatment.
Being a cynical person, however, I tend to think that the medical community and the government has failed us when it comes to researching and treating the role of men as vectors for disease. In American society, women continue to bear the brunt of the burden when it come to healthcare. Women are responsible for contraception, for protecting the family from communicable diseases, for organizing and paying for healthcare for the family. When healthcare isn’t affordable, it’s women and children that go without. Once again, women are bearing the responsibility for stemming the spread of communicable diseases.
Does this really make sense though? One man can infect many, many people with a communicable disease. In fact, women are eight times more likely than men to contract HIV during unprotected heterosexual sex. Some studies have even suggested that men only have 1% chance in any unprotected sexual encounter of contracting HIV from an infected woman. If you tested and treated one man, educating him about spreading communicable disease, wouldn’t you statistically-speaking be saving many women and men from contracting the disease?
Perhaps an analogy is in order. When fishermen fish for crabs, they usually throw most or all of the females back into the water. The wisdom is that one male crab can impregnate many female crabs, but one female crab can only reproduce so many times in a season.
The government doesn’t much care for my logic though. The lastest trend in HIV legislation is mandatory HIV testing of pregnant women. In Nevada, recent legislation requires medical facilities to offer HIV testing to all pregnant women. If the pregnant woman refuses, then the medical facility is required to test the child within a certain amount of time after birth. In effect, the law mandates testing of pregnant women–because it is near impossible for a child to be born HIV positive if its mother is HIV negative.
Mandatory HIV testing has been hailed as a positive means of preventing cases of pediatric AIDS. Yet, it is also a fairly offensive invasion of a woman’s privacy. The State has determined that its interest in preventing pediatric AIDS outweighs the interest of women in keeping their health issues private. In states where anonymous testing for communicable diseases is not available, such as Nevada, it is a particularly egregious invasion of privacy, which only targets women.
Nevada is not alone in adopting mandatory HIV testing of pregnant women. Many other states have passed similar legislation, and Nevada was actually late in the game.
I raise mandatory testing to demonstrate a point:
Women are the focus of efforts to test and treat communicable diseases and therefore deal with the consequences of testing and treatment to a greater degree than men. Yet, it seems that testing and treating more men would actually do more to prevent the transmission of communicable diseases, since men statistically have more opportunity to spread the disease to both other men and to women.
So before the powers that be spend one more dime testing and treating women, I demand: Why not men?