>Hiv/AIDS or mad cow disease is not a death sentence.  The fact of birth/life
>means that we will die.  So a disease is not a death sentence.

Yeah, yeah, we all gotta die of something, and it might be a big bus,
tomorrow.  Still, all disease diagnoses do not have the same prognoses.
Chicken pox is NOT the same as HIV infection.  Mad-cow disease takes a long
time to kill, but it's a really nasty downhill spiral, just as Huntington's
disease is.  I'll take a breast cancer diagnosis any day over pancreatic
cancer or colon cancer or liver cancer.

What is the current life expectancy of someone newly diagnosed with HIV?
How long do newborns who are HIV positive and were infected prenatally
survive?  What percentage of people who are HIV positive die of something
totally unrelated to their HIV (like a car accident or a homicide?)?

The people currently dying of bovine spongy encephalopathy got bovine-based
growth hormone in the 1950s-1980s, so yes, they lived a long time before the
disease killed them.  But kill them it does, eventually and gruesomely.

If I had to make a choice between putting my child at risk of HIV from
contaminated banked milk (yes, yes, I know that's not likely) or at risk of
BSE from genetically engineered cow's milk formula -- I don't see an easy
answer as to which one is worse.  That was my original point.  The solution
of course, is to breastfeed.

Kathy Dettwyler

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