OXFORD — When a fatal “wasting disease” first spread among gay men mostly on the West Coast there was no political imperative to act.

In the 30 years since, not only did an imperative develop, it has helped the AIDS virus keep spreading.

Today, San Francisco is not among the epicenters of the continuing epidemic.

Mississippi is.

This would not be true if HIV had been greeted and treated the way earlier infectious diseases, sexually transmitted or not, were dealt with.

Initially, prejudice fueled AIDS. Starting in 1981, it spread through communities of homosexual men and IV drug users — people with little political clout. They attracted little to no public sympathy.

Righteous indignation among gays followed, rage over the indifference, calls for action. Politicians stepped up and initiated sweeping and expensive responses. As part of this, because AIDS was stigmatizing (if you had it you just had to be gay, a drug addict or both), assorted health secrecy laws were enacted.

In Mississippi, for example, a 1986 statute sealed all death records. At the time, The Clarion-Ledger and other newspapers in the state printed obituaries as news stories. Because “what happened?” is the first question people ask when learning someone has died, the state’s largest paper insisted on including causes of death in obits.

The Legislature’s response — in part to spite The Clarion-Ledger and in part to spare a family the stress of disclosing that a relative had AIDS — was to decree for the first time in state history that no one had a need to know how another person died.

The new law was ill-considered. Survivors, regardless of the cause of a death, faced obtaining court orders for death certificates to file life insurance claims. Statisticians who track morbidity were left with no data. But it was a sign of the times. To have AIDS was disgraceful, so the politically correct thing to do was to erect legal barriers to make the public epidemic purely a private matter. This continues. Only two years ago, President Barack Obama ended the practice of testing prospective immigrants for the AIDS virus on the belief that a positive test might be used to discriminate.

It’s 2011. It is estimated there are about 40 million people living with HIV, the infectious organism that leads to AIDS, around the world. That’s 13 times the population of Mississippi. Three years ago, Congress allocated another $48 billion for retroviral medicines essential to keeping infected people alive in other countries, most of them in Africa.

Mississippi has only about 8,000 people known to be living with HIV, but no one knows how many are infected and the rate of increase here is among the fastest anywhere.

Why?

Because the only way to find out is to be tested and the only way to be tested is to ask.

That’s right.

A worker or anyone else who goes to a clinic for a routine health screening will have his or her blood checked for myriad problems, including a whole roster of sexually transmitted diseases. The way diseases such as syphilis and ghonorrea are kept in check (to the extent they are kept in check) is that screening for them is routine and reports to public health officials are required.

A century ago, when the threat of epidemic seemed more real, people could be and often were quarantined — held against their will — if they posed a threat to the health of others. That was an extreme approach, but it worked.

HIV is especially insidious in that the virus can remain dormant for months or even years. It can be spread innocently by an infected person during this whole time. Yet our federal and state lawmakers continue to consider this a private matter.

To teach school, a person must be tested for tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. But HIV, as our collective thinking about it has evolved, remains off limits although in Mississippi it appears a person is much more likely to test positive for HIV than for tuberculosis.

Germs are germs and viruses are viruses. They don’t care about personal privacy or political correctness. They are “opportunistic.”

HIV initially spread because no one cared about its victims. Today it spreads because we care too much and have placed the deadly virus in a cocoon of privacy.

People who are HIV positive don’t need to be locked up, but they do need to know. Test results should be as confidential as any medical procedure — but they should be as common as any other blood test.

Our laws should be designed to fight the disease, not help it spread.

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Charlie Mitchell is a Mississippi journalist. Write to him at Box 1, University, MS 38677, or e-mail cmitchell43@yahoo.com.