Early in the film there was a great deal of debate about closing the Bath Houses in NYC and San Francisco. what was the justification for this, as depicted in the film? and do you think closing the Bath Houses was justified, given the circumstances at the time?

 

Public administrators chose to close the bathhouses in San Francisco and New York because according to the finding of CDC investigators, the majority of HIV patients were infected in the bathhouses. In my opinion, the intention to close the bathhouses could be justified, especially at the time, when healthcare professionals had to find ways of limiting the spread of the epidemic. Certainly, this decision could violate people’s civic rights. Nevertheless, it could save a great number of people. This task was critical because people like Gaëtan Dugas could have infected many people in the bathhouses. Certainly, nowadays such a measure is not justified because the HIV virus cannot be associated with certain locations such as bathhouses, but CDC did not about it in the early eighties.

Briefly explain how the CDC researchers and local health authorities”proved” that this new disease was in fact a sexually transmitted disease (STD)?

The CDC researchers found it difficult to prove that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. At first, they had to rely only on the findings of cluster studies which indicated that many of the patients, suffering from this disease, had sexual intercourse with one another. However, they could find definitive proof of this conjecture only after the discovery of the HIV virus. This is one of the reasons why medical workers could effectively help patients and prevent people from being infected.

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