Posted on 02/16/2006 3:01:35 AM PST by iowamark
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa Mary Goedken (GED'-ken) of Monticello, the matriarch of an Iowa family that lost eight people to AIDS, has died.
She died on Monday at a Monticello nursing home following a brief illness. She was 91.
Goedken's family says she had been in declining health since suffering a stroke in December.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no other family in the U-S is known to have lost more members to AIDS than the Goedkens.
Six of her seven sons suffered from hemophilia.
One son died of complications from hemophilia in 1971. In the 1980s, five others took a blood-clotting product contaminated with H-I-V -- the virus that causes AIDS.
All five sons, two of their wives and an infant son who was born with AIDS all died between 1987 and 1997.
Goedken's sole surviving son is 56-year-old Stephen Goedken of Dubuque. He says his mother had "deep faith," and "she accepted things the way they were."
Goedken is also survived by four daughters and a host of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Faith, she said again and again, is what got her through it all.
That and strength, a tiny woman holding up an entire family.
"I live from day to day and keep going," she once told me. "I go to Mass every morning. That seems to be where I can get relief. . . . I just can't believe the six of them (her sons) are gone. I think about it, and I just can't believe it."
Despite what the MSM says, there are some great Catholics out there.
The company I worked for back 1979 and into the early 1980's produced vast quantities of AHF or Anti Hemophilic Factor(sometimes known as clotting factor). This was before the AIDS thing became a known factor. This factor was produced by pooling vast quantities of fresh frozen Human Plasma and then in thawing it the first solid out, Cryoprecipitate would be further processed into the AHF. Now instead of having one or 2 donors, you were taking a serum pooled from thousands of people with who knows what disease. My company and other companies literally killed off a good chunk of the people who were our customers for the drug. We of course had to stop production and it was more than a couple of years before we started producing AHF again, though this time we had developed a proprietary virus inactivation method still used to this day for various human blood serums.
In the early days of the HIV scare, I thought it should have been treated as a communicable disease. It was my opinoin that a registry should have been developed, and that people with the disease should have been put on notice as to what would and would not be acceptable behavior.
C Everet Coop and the CDC felt different. No, this was not a disease of one focus group. It's affects would be felt across the population base. Well, how right they were.
People with HIV felt no compulsion to avoid giving blood. High risk groups were not warned to avoid it. Yes, how right they were. Coop and the CDC made damned sure their predictions came to fruition. The general public was exposed.
Many innocent children and adults who were leading wholesome lives were exposed to a disease that they never should have been exposed to. And still folks wear the ribbons as an affirmation that a certain segment of our society, will never be held to account for their personal choices.
Today bath houses where sexual acts are committed with multiple partners on a daily basis, remain open. Personal decisions remain above reproach.
Mary Goedken of Monticello has died. God rest her soul, and the souls of her other family members. In God's own time, I'm not so sure He's going to be as kind to some other people whose decisions both public and private have cost so many so much.
Here's some food for thought. Do you think there is a higher percentage of truly good people in the media, or in Catholocism today? My opinion veers away from the MSM players on this one. Them sitting in judgement of just about anyone is a sad commentary.
Wow such high praise!
OOPS!!! NEVER post before coffee. SIX of her SEVEN sons presented with hemophilia. Not all SEVEN. Perhaps not homozygous recessive. My Bad!!!
We regret and retract the error.
Back to coffee.
Do you think I went to easy on them? LOL
But what really chaps my hide is folks expecting me to pick up the tab for their stupid 'lifestyle choices'.
That being said, this disease should have been treated exactly like TB or typhus. Anyone refusing to modify their behavior should have been involuntarily quarantined to prevent the spread of infection.
But because the first group to become infected on a widespread basis is politically powerful the rest of us had to sit by and watch this horrible disease spread into the general population. The worst part about it is that kids like Ryan White had to pay for it with their lives.
Had the CDC done their damn jobs AIDS would have been reduced to a sad footnote. Instead they kowtowed to the Gay Lobby and let a lethal infection take thousands more lives than it should have.
L
Smokers are ostracized and homosexuals are deified.
Was the source of the original plasma outlets known? Or just pooled nationally?
I think we're in agreement on this. I am obviously tweaked at what was allowed to take place though, and so I spout off about it once in a while.
People with HIV felt no compulsion to avoid giving blood. High risk groups were not warned to avoid it. Yes, how right they were. Coop and the CDC made damned sure their predictions came to fruition. The general public was exposed.
You instilled some consternation on my part. What's the overall status of a person with AIDS who smokes? Does AIDS trump the negative persona of smoking? I'm perplexed! Heh heh heh...
This was before the aids scare caused the strict regulation of blood to the extent it is today. We got blood from blood centers and the red cross from across the nation, and although it was tested for hepatitis, and each bag had to be accounted for, HIV was at first an unknown and later untestable. Till finally it all fell together. People died from transfusions, but lots more, 10's of thousands, died from the Drug produced to help hemophiliacs.
I believe tennis player Arthur Ashe died from a transfusion.
Overall, I'm not sure a 'Biblical" solution was advisable, but one would think a reasoned prudent response would have been the minimal standard.
This should have been handled as a simple public health issue. There is absolutely a ton of law, common sense, and precedent on the side of quarantining folks who refuse to stop engaging in behaviors that spread a lethal disease.
They can be as queer as they want to be, but they have no right to endanger the public.
L
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