As a rule, I am generally very tolerant of the media in this country.

Are television and news media biased, greedy or irresponsible? Of course they are.

More often than not, media outlets are (at least partially) defined by their focuses, interests and biases.

Nevertheless, I don’t hold any of that against the media. If people are stupid enough to be greatly influenced or taken advantage of by media, it’s their fault alone.

But there is one topic that is so irresponsibly understated and misrepresented by our media that it defies any loathsome description: the portrayal of HIV-positive individuals.

We have now, as society produced such a sheltered and politically-correct mass media, that we have now put ourselves at a greater risk of ignorance.

The human immunodeficiency virus, or more popularly known as HIV, has two very unique characteristics: it is both 100 percent fatal and 100 percent preventable.

And so, regarding these two facts, it seems impossible that 40 million people in the world are infected.

Forty million people are carrying an incurable disease, and they will all die from complications from HIV.

I realize that it’s hard to see the forest from the trees, but has everybody just forgotten that we are right in the middle of the most massive global pandemic in recorded history?

Does the very nature of HIV, being a slow-acting, chronic disease lend itself to being overlooked by those who are not at risk? I believe so.

HIV is the perfect disease. HIV is invisible to the human immune system. It mutates over 50 times faster than influenza and kills very, very slowly.

Killing the host is not in the interest of any pathogen, viral or otherwise. HIV gives people years to infect other hosts, eliminating the need for a secondary “natural reservoir” as it has a limitless reservoir in humans.

That said, I will return to the media. Every time an HIV-positive individual is shown, whether in the newspaper, the news or the real world, she or he is presented either as completely normal, or malnourished and sickly.

While both of these portrayals are accurate for 95 percent of the time that one has HIV, they do horrible injustice to the reality of the disease.

Remember that HIV does not, can not and will not kill anyone – HIV destroys the immune system that protects that person from everything else.

So while the people frequently shown mostly normal, for the sake of prevention, it helps to realize that those people will eventually die prematurely.

So I say to every media outlet that prides itself on awareness advertising: where are the people dying from septicemia, or the people who drown internally from pneumocystis carinii or another form of pneumonia?

What happened to the people with yeast infections of the scalp and mouth, or whose legs become one massive rotting tumor from Kaposi Sarcoma?

Or those who die from lymphomas, carcinomas, meningitis, or toxoplasmosis?

Or would reality make people too uncomfortable?