People living with HIV and AIDS can be and are productive members of society up until a period very near their death, so the analogy doesn't quite follow in this case. Moreover, treatment allows them to maintain a pre-infection quality of life. In the case of the infected, there is legitimate medical precedent, I feel, to suspect that the infected have been brain damaged in some drastic way. I believe that extremely high fevers can cause brain damage, so we are forced to consider what spending 3+ years with your body temperature around 106 F would do to your brain.Gil Hamilton wrote:As for the rest, well... we treat people with AIDS, don't we, even though there is no chance of saving their lives and eventually will be killed. They are sick, and helping them if possible is the right thing to do, even if shooting them on the spot would be more expedient. Maybe if they are rehabilitated then they can stop being "useless", as you put it, and go back to possibly being someone's loved one or family or just a human being again.
Another, more sinister interpretation I thought of is this: when he first treats the infected woman with the cure, it kills her. It's only by lowering her body temperature, then giving her the cure, that he can actually save her life. If it turns out that the infected, once cured, suffer from extreme brain damage, the various enclaves of humanity could then use the cure to reliably and easily kill every infected person they encountered, thus ensuring their own survival. As a bonus, if they encountered someone with the early stages of infection (like Sam the dog), they would retain a valid treatment for these people/animals. Therefore, Neville's legend would be one of a savior of the humans as the destroyer of the infected, rather than a savior of both the humans and the infected.
Finally, we must consider that the upper limit for the worldwide human population is around 12 million people, with another 588 million infected. This doesn't account for the humans that the infected have hunted and killed, as well as the infected who have been killed. Regardless, the ratio of infected to healthy humans is staggering, and we must call into question the mere practicality of attempting to cure half a billion insane monsters. How much of your labor force can you spare for this task, which includes manufacturing the cure, building and maintaining appropriate treatment facilities, and actually venturing out and capturing violently unwilling people to administer the cure? What kind of casualties can you endure before you have to shut down the program entirely, as you have to focus on keeping the crops growing and the electricity running.
