The terrorist attacks of September 11 and their aftermath have upstaged other tragedies in the world's attention, including the on-going tragedy of HIV/AIDS around the world. Even the marking of December 1 as World AIDS Day somehow got lost in the headlines of the growing violence in the Middle East, the bombings in Afghanistan and the continuing mystery of anthrax in America.
Although we in the U.S. tend to think that AIDS is a disease which has been eradicated because of the success of antiretroviral drugs over the past decade, nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, as American public health officials focus on anthrax and the possibilities of smallpox infection, HIV/AIDS continues to stalk poor people and people of color. For example, the African American community, which is about 12% of the U.S. population, accounts for 47% of the U.S. AIDS cases reported in 2000. Young women of color are particularly vulnerable, with almost one-third of new HIV-positive cases among women.
And if HIV/AIDS in the U.S. has dropped off the radar screen of most Americans, one can be sure that we have very little understanding of the impact of this disease around the world. Most of us, for instance, have no idea that there are 40 million people in the world living with HIV/AIDS, including 2.7 million children. In this year alone 5 million new people were infected with the disease and 3 million (including more than half a million children) have died from it.
But as bad as the picture looks around the world, in Africa HIV/AIDS has taken
on a whole new meaning. Indeed, a whole generation of Africans has been nearly
wiped out. More than two-thirds of those who died from AIDS this year in the
world were Africans. Millions more have died in the past decade. That means
that 7 million farmers have died since 1985, with another 16 million expected
to die, which translates to widespread food shortages and very real hunger for
millions of Africans. That means that millions of school children have lost
their teachers to AIDS, with hundreds of schools forced to close. That means
that large numbers of doctors and health care workers are dying, as are many
of the small number of highly-skilled civil servants upon whom the poor nations
of Africa rely on for public management and core social services.
But the impact of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is not only on those who are dying.
There are the millions of orphans in a society which in the past always cared
for orphaned children within the extended family, but now finds no family left.
How will these children be fed and clothed and cared for by a social service
system that too often finds its funds diverted to pay off national debts still
carried by some developing nations? How will these poor nations get the estimated
15% of their national budget needed to improve their health care when their
young adult generation has been decimated? And what about the tens of thousands
of children in Africa who are living with HIV/AIDS and who surely will die without
the necessary and expensive medications? HIV/AIDS has become the biggest threat
to the continent's development in our lifetime.
All of which makes even more incredible the position of South African President
Thabo Mbeki who still seems to be in complete denial about his nation and AIDS.
Early on in his presidency and despite years of scientific evidence, he refused
to acknowledge that HIV leads to AIDS and was slow in getting his national public
health officials working on the crisis. Despite President Mbeki's claim that
AIDS is not a crisis in South Africa, one in nine South Africans is living with
AIDS and a third of the pregnant women in some provinces there have tested positive
for the virus. Yet, he still refuses to make available to these women the drug
which might prevent the unborn children from getting the deadly disease.
Unfortunately, like President Mbeki, too many people in the world are living
with their heads in the sand when it comes to HIV/AIDS. Too many people in the
church, too many people in the mosque, too many people in public positions,
too many people in schools, too many people in prisons, too many people everywhere
believe that HIV/AIDS doesn't impact them. HIV/AIDS is a totally preventable
disease, but the first step must be acknowledgment that the world and our communities
are in a crisis and we can do something about it. That would be a wonderful
turn of events in this new century and this new millennium.