Schadenfreude is that uniquely German expression describing the pleasure someone derives from watching/enjoying someone else's misery. Of course, we should not really enjoy someone else's misery, even less so someone else's premature, preventable death. Sometimes though, especially when the harm is self-inflicted and very predictable, one can't help but feel somewhat schadenfreudig.Well, on this occasion, another HIV denialist bit the dust. Christine Maggiore died of an AIDS related illness (a typical AIDS indicator disease, pneumonia) late December. Maggiore's main claim to fame (other than founding the Italian design company Allessi) was that she was HIV positive but refused to take any anti-HIV medication. She belonged to a small band of HIV denialists who continue to insist that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS.
Worse than her harming herself, however, being pregnant twice, she also refused to take HIV mother-to-child-prevention medication during pregnancy, with the result that one of her kids became HIV infected, and eventually died on AIDS. All of this she did in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence of the life-preserving capacities of standard HIV medicines. The coroner in the US, at the time, declared the child's death to be AIDS related. A HIV denialist retained by Maggiore (a veterinary toxicologist of all things) declared that her daughter died as a result of an allergic reaction to amoxicillin. Maggiore lived a 'healthy life', ie a life without any drugs. According to the denialist community she should have been able to live forever, sadly at the age of 52 she died a premature death caused by AIDS.
Well, what can one say other than that stubbornness in the face of overwhelming evidence is a pretty silly thing. One got to give her credit tho for sacrificing her life in order to be able to stick credibly to her obviously false beliefs on HIV.
