Via a long chain of blogs comes this post claiming that an upcoming biography of science fiction author Isaac Asimov – – written by his wife Janet — reveals that Asimov died of AIDS. At the time of his death in 1992, the cause was given as heart and kidney failure.
Asimov apparently contracted the disease during open heart surgery in 1992. It is odd that Asimov and then his wife kept that fact secret for so long, especially given Asimov’s humanist views. Certainly keeping his disease a secret was his right and his business, but it seems very incongruous with his other views.
Finally, the person who posted this wonders,
How many other cases like this are going to come out of the closet, proving that it’s not just the gay community that’s affected?
After AIDS was finally understood, no one doubted that heterosexuals could contract the disease but at the same time the various campaigns (at least in the United States) to tell people that AIDS could strike anyone were misguided and almost certainly cost lives (since they wasted so much money targeting populations that were at relatively low risks).
Through 1998, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that less than 10 percent of all reported AIDS cases up to that point were from heterosexual sexual contact. This despite the fact that heterosexuals make up in excess of 90 percent of the U.S. population.
The interesting thing about this statistic is why it is apparently almost the reverse in Africa’s epidemic. There is a lot of controversy about the accuracy of AIDS figures in African countries, but even if the estimates are wildly off, there is far more of a problem with heterosexual AIDS in Africa than there ever was in the United States. Why is that?