African Women Confront Bush’s AIDS Policy

Yifat Susskind of Foreign Policy in Focus writes:

...[G]rowing numbers of people around the world know that sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic: three-quarters of AIDS deaths worldwide have been in Africa, and today the continent is home to nearly two-thirds of all of those who are HIV-positive (more than 25 million people). Fewer people know that most Africans living with HIV/AIDS are women, and that young women are now being infected at a rate three to four times higher than young men. For many, this information is absorbed through a mesh of stereotypes that make human misery
seem like a natural condition of life in Africa .

But while AIDS—like the litany of this year's natural disasters—may have originated in nature, the magnitude of its destruction is a man-made catastrophe. Consider the following:

• Since the 1980s when AIDS first emerged, the United States has demanded “economic austerity measures” in impoverished countries. In Africa , these policies cut national health budgets in half just when public health systems needed to be ramped up to combat AIDS. Today, the pandemic is the single
  greatest obstacle to economic development in Africa .
• To bolster already-huge profits of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, the Bush administration has blocked the sale of affordable generic drugs that have saved millions of lives in rich countries.
• Women are made particularly vulnerable to HIV infection because they are denied the rights to refuse sex or insist on condom use. As the majority of those living in poverty and the poorest of the poor, women are more likely to contract HIV and more likely to develop symptoms of AIDS soon after they are infected.

AIDS, unjust economic policies, and women's inequality are mutually reinforcing crises; combating any one of these requires addressing them together. But too often, public health programs, government policies, and even activists compartmentalize issues, missing critical points of inter-connection that are keys to effecting change.

AIDS in DC

The press coverage yesterday was depressingly scarce. 18 years of World AIDS Days and I guess everyone just doesn't care anymore.

Today the Washington Post's Darragh Johnson talked about the Whitman Walker clinic's mobile testing unit that was out on the streets yesterday. Despite the fact that:

Washington's rate of infection is alarmingly high -- at Whitman-Walker's clinic in Southeast the positive test rate is 6 percent -- and it's not going down. In 2001, in cities with more than a half-million residents, the relative numbers of Washingtonians infected with AIDS outpaced the country's other big cities, according to a thick report on "HIV/AIDS in the Nation's Capital," released in August by D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a public interest organization.

So. To recap. Each of the numbers below represents the number of AIDS cases per 100,000 residents in 2001:

Washington -- 119

Baltimore -- 117

San Francisco -- 67

New York -- 64

Philadelphia -- 58

In 2003, two years later, D.C.'s number had jumped to 170.

(Johnson [2005] "In a City With A Big Problem, Trying to
Turn A Corner on AIDS" The Washington Post 2Dec05 )

Noone wants to get tested. The mobile testing unit spent the day hanging out and encouraging people to come and find out their status, but to little effect.

*

Some good news: Yesterday the Guardian reported:

Europe, led by the UK, last night signalled a major split with the United States over curbing the Aids pandemic in a statement that tacitly urged African governments not to heed the abstinence-focused agenda of the Bush administration.

(Bosely [2005] "Europeans reject abstinence message
in split with US on Aids " The Guardian 1Dec05)