Was reading the real estate section from Sunday, and there was an article on "haunted houses." Apparently, it is a legal requirement to list if a person has recently died in a home you are trying to sell. There is one exception: if that person died from AIDS.

I thought this was odd. Of course there is no way to get AIDS from living in a house where someone died of it, but there is also no way to get cancer from a house where someone died of it. Why the difference? Of course I knew. AIDS is still the world's first politically protected lethal disease.

This got me thinking. Four people (I think) have died of anthrax, a disease with a specific cure (if caught early enough.) About half a million Americans have died of AIDS, a disease with no known cure. Neither disease is easily contagious, but both were spread through known mechanisms.

Think about the way the government and the media have reacted to the anthrax crisis, compared to the treatment given the AIDS epidemic, particularly in the early stages.

BTW, the reward for the guy spreading the anthrax, a person who deliberately spread a lethal disease to total strangers, is over a million dollars.

Comments?