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| GMCarter 2006-09-29, 8:20 am |
| http://www.retroconference.org/2001...stracts/266.htm
266 The Probability of HIV-1 Transmission Per Coital Act in
Monogamous HIV-Discordant Couples, Rakai, Uganda.
R. H. Gray*1, R. Brookmeyer1, M. J. Wawer2, N. K. Sewankambo3, T. C.
Quinn1, D. Serwadda3, and F. Wabwire-Mangen3.
1Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD;2Columbia Univ., New York, NY;
and3Makerere Univ., Kampala, Uganda.
Background:The probability of HIV transmission per coital act has not
been determined in sub-Saharan Africa.
Methods:174 monogamous HIV-discordant couples were identified
retrospectively from a population-based cohort in Rakai, Uganda. Usual
frequency of intercourse per month was ascertained, and HIV viral load
in HIV- positive partners was determined by PCR. The reliability of
frequency of intercourse reported by partners within couples was
assessed by paired t tests. Conditional probabilities of transmission
were estimated by log-log binomial regression and adjusted to the
median viral load (12,476 copies/mL) and age of the population (20-29
years).
Results:Frequency of intercourse was 8.9/month and declined
significantly with age and HIV viral load. Members of couples reported
comparable frequencies of intercourse. The probability of transmission
per contact was 0.0019, declined significantly with age (0.0016 ages
15-19 to 0.0005 ages 40-59 years, p<0.001), and increased
significantly with HIV viral load (0.0001 <3,500 copies/mL and 0.0051
50,000 copies/mL, p < 0001), but did not differ between HIV-1 subtypes
A and D. Probability of transmission for HIV+females was 0.0022 and
for HIV+males was 0.0013 (p = 0.34). STD diagnoses or symptoms did not
significantly affect the risk, with the exception of HIV-negative
subjects with positive HSV-2 (0.0041) versus HSV-2 negative serology
(0.0005, p = 0.004). Acquisition per act was lower in HIV-negative
circumcised men.
Conclusion:The probability of HIV transmission per sex act in Uganda
is comparable to that in other populations, suggesting that
infectivity of HIV subtypes cannot explain the explosive epidemic in
Africa. Viral load and age are the main determinants of the
probability of transmission per coital act.
© 8th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections
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| DavidT 2006-09-29, 8:20 am |
| Some other data from the Rakai group: (Dr Dach take note)
Quinn TC, Wawer MJ, Sewankambo N, Serwadda D, Li CJ, Wabwire-Mangen F,
Meehan MO, Lutalo T, Gary RH, and Rakai Project Study Group. Viral
Load and the Risk of Heterosexual Transmission of Human
Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1. N Engl J Med 2000, 342(13): 921-929.
Condom use increased from 10% - 17% during the study. Despite this, the
transmission rate to an uninfected partner was 12% per year (23% for
those with VL >50 000/ml).
No evidence for heterosexual transmission there then...... ;)
Abstract:
Background and Methods:We examined the influence of viral load in
relation to other risk factors for the heterosexual transmission of
human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). In a community-based study
of 15,127 persons in a rural district of Uganda, we identified 415
couples in which one partner was HIV-1-positive and one was initially
HIV-1-negative and followed them prospectively for up to 30 months. The
incidence of HIVA infection per 100 person-years among the initially
seronegative partners was examined in relation to behavioral and
biologic variables.
Results: The male partner was HIV-1-positive in 228 couples, and the
female partner was HIV-1-positive in 187 couples. Ninety of the 415
initially HIV-1negative partners seroconverted (incidence, 11.8 per 100
person-years). The rate of male-to-female transmission was not
significantly different from the rate of female-to-male transmission
(12.0 per 100 personyears vs. 11.6 per 100 person-years). The incidence
of seroconversion was highest among the partners who were 15 to 19
years of age (15.3 per 100 person-years). The incidence was 16.7 per
100 person-years among 137 uncircumcised male partners, whereas there
were no seroconversions among the 50 circumcised male partners
(P<0.001). The mean serum HIV-1 RNA level was significantly higher
among HIV-1-positive subjects whose partners seroconverted than among
those whose partners did not seroconvert (90,254 copies per milliliter
vs. 38,029 copies per milliliter, P=0.01). There were no instances of
transmission among the 51 subjects with serum HIVA RNA levels of less
than 1500 copies per milliliter; there was a significant closeresponse
relation of increased transmission with increasing viral load. In
multivariate analyses of logtransformed HIVA RNA levels, each log
increment in the viral load was associated with a rate ratio of 2.45
for seroconversion (95 percent confidence interval, 1.85 to 3.26).
Conclusions: The viral load is the chief predictor of the risk of
heterosexual transmission of HIV-1, and transmission is rare among
persons with levels of less than 1500 copies of HIV-1 RNA per
milliliter. (N Engl J Med 2000;342:921-9.)
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"DavidT" <david199@volcanomail.com> wrote in message
>
> Results: The male partner was HIV-1-positive in 228 couples, and the
> female partner was HIV-1-positive in 187 couples.
The San Francisco Chronicle in a series of articles published on Sunday and Monday examined the
"down-low" phenomenon -- when men have sex with both male and female partners but do not
mention their male relationships to friends, family members or female partners -- in the
African-American community. The articles are summarized below.
"Secret Encounters of Bisexual Black Men Could Be Creating Wave of Infected Women": Because the
phenomenon is "defined by secrecy," little is known about men on the down low, the Chronicle
reports. CDC has launched five studies to help determine the size of the down-low population
and whether these men play a role in the rising number of HIV cases among African-American
women, according to the Chronicle. CDC's findings, along with the findings of other
researchers, are expected to be important in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the African-American
community, the Chronicle reports (Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle, 5/1).
"The Stunned Wife: Preacher Husband Infected Her With HIV Knowingly": The Chronicle profiled
Ava Gardner-Shipp, a 44-year-old African-American woman whose minister husband secretly had sex
with other men and knowingly transmitted HIV to her. Since revealing her story, Gardner-Shipp
says many other women have told her they "feared their husbands were on the down low" and
shared similar experiences, the Chronicle reports (Johnson [1], San Francisco Chronicle, 5/2).
"The Double Life: Former Sailor Dated Women, Also Had Secret Sex With Men": The Chronicle
profiled Blue Buddha, a 38-year-old African-American man who for many years secretly had sex
with men while dating women. His experience demonstrates the "hostility toward homosexuality"
in the black community, which causes many men to keep their sexual activity secret, according
to the Chronicle (Johnson [2], San Francisco Chronicle, 5/2).
Back to other news for May 2, 2005
Reprinted with permission from kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS
Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at
www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/hiv. The Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report is published for
kaisernetwork.org, a free service of the Kaiser Family Foundation, by The Advisory Board
Company. © 2004 by The Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights
reserved.
This article is a part of the publication Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report.
Our thanks to Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which provided this article to The Body.
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| " Death" <Death@yourdoor.net> schreef in bericht
news:4IaTg.42940$vX5.27547@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
>
> "DavidT" <david199@volcanomail.com> wrote in message
>
>
> The San Francisco Chronicle in a series of articles published on Sunday and Monday examined the
> "down-low" phenomenon -- when men have sex with both male and female partners but do not
> mention their male relationships to friends, family members or female partners -- in the
> African-American community. The articles are summarized below.
You're talking about bisexuality. Which is not an African American phenomenon.
> "Secret Encounters of Bisexual Black Men Could Be Creating Wave of Infected Women": Because the
> phenomenon is "defined by secrecy," little is known about men on the down low, the Chronicle
> reports.
Welcome to the world of closeted bisexuals. So how is this an African American phenomenon?
(And why is the conditional 'could be creating' included in the title - don't
they have evidence what they are asking is true?)
> CDC has launched five studies to help determine the size of the down-low population
> and whether these men play a role in the rising number of HIV cases among African-American
> women, according to the Chronicle. CDC's findings, along with the findings of other
> researchers, are expected to be important in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the African-American
> community, the Chronicle reports (Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle, 5/1).
>
> "The Stunned Wife: Preacher Husband Infected Her With HIV Knowingly": The Chronicle profiled
> Ava Gardner-Shipp, a 44-year-old African-American woman whose minister husband secretly had sex
> with other men and knowingly transmitted HIV to her.
Oh no, not... a preacher!
What's next - dentists, lawyers... politicians?
Since revealing her story, Gardner-Shipp
> says many other women have told her they "feared their husbands were on the down low" and
> shared similar experiences, the Chronicle reports (Johnson [1], San Francisco Chronicle, 5/2).
>
> "The Double Life: Former Sailor Dated Women, Also Had Secret Sex With Men": The Chronicle
> profiled Blue Buddha, a 38-year-old African-American man who for many years secretly had sex
> with men while dating women.
This is a joke, right? Of the 'A horny saylor walks into a bar...' variety?
> His experience demonstrates the "hostility toward homosexuality"
> in the black community, which causes many men to keep their sexual activity secret, according
> to the Chronicle (Johnson [2], San Francisco Chronicle, 5/2).
> Back to other news for May 2, 2005
'Hostility to homosexuality in the black community', as opposed to the
across the board acceptance of homosexuality in the white community?
If this was so, why do...
1) whites force homosexuals to congregate in San Francisco and Manhattan?
2) whites propose a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage?
3) all the white preachers condemn homosexuality as 'a sin'?
4) why does the white pope condemn homosexuality?
The entire notion of trying to *spin* this into a racial issue is
ridiculous to begin with. Just because some selfpromoting
fellow called DL King wants to hype bisexuality in the
black community by giving it some snazzy name (the 'down low'),
doesn't mean everyone has to follow everything he says.
And from the Kaiser foundation too. I guess they see
a good marketing ploy when they see one.
Alex
| |
| GMCarter 2006-09-30, 4:20 pm |
| On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:22:49 -0000, "Alex"
<avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote:
>" Death" <Death@yourdoor.net> schreef in bericht
>news:4IaTg.42940$vX5.27547@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
>
>You're talking about bisexuality. Which is not an African American phenomenon.
Of COURSE not. No. Alex knows.
Jesus H. Christ. This is perhaps one of those stellar moments of
realization about just how XXXXing stupid you are.
George M. Carter
**
LET ME SEE IF I GOT THIS RIGHT
September 5, 2006
I'm supposed to believe that the man who sat in a classroom reading a
kids' book for seven minutes AFTER he was told the country was under
attack, who was warned repeatedly about imminent threats against the
country and chose to ignore them, who has traipsed off on vacation
every time there is a domestic or international disaster, is a
decisive man-of-action with the fortitude to run a nation.
I am supposed to believe that God himself chooses my nation's leaders
and that, in His infinite wisdom, he chose a lying, thieving,
self-absorbed, pro-torture, pro-war, lazy frat-boy jerk like George W.
Bush.
I am supposed to believe that the same man who used family money and
influence to duck military duty, who has failed at every business
venture he ever tried, who never did an honest day's work or
accomplished anything of value in his entire life, is fit to be
Commander-in-Chief.
I am supposed to believe that a man who ignores the Constitution he
swore to uphold, breaks the law with abandon, repeatedly lied about
the reasons for going to war, its cost, its duration, and even its
goals, is honest and trustworthy.
I am supposed to believe that the escalating violence, chaos and
deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are a sign of progress.
I am supposed to believe that a man who, by his own admission, does
not read newspapers, who only meets with and listens to 'yes' men, who
refuses to speak before any group that is not hand picked from his
staunchest supporters, is in touch with the realities of the world.
I am supposed to believe that sending US soldiers into combat without
proper equipment or a viable military strategy, while decreasing their
pensions and their benefits, is a patriotic display of supporting the
troops.
I am supposed to believe that gutting the funding of social programs
aimed at assisting the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless is
the outcome of good Christians being in office, and that torturing,
maiming and killing innocent civilians is "doing the Lord's work".
Oh, don't go anywhere, because I haven't even gotten started yet.
Am I supposed to believe that a president who acts like an
ill-mannered, oafish, mindless buffoon in public, both at home and in
international settings, and a vice president who tells a colleague to
go f*ck himself in the course of conducting the country's business,
are both deserving of respect.
I am supposed to believe that spying on US citizens, quashing free
speech, and suspending laws that govern detention and confinement
without just cause is preserving the tenets of democracy.
I am supposed to believe that alienating our allies, isolating
ourselves from the world, refusing to use diplomacy instead of
aggression, and causing people around the globe to hate us is the best
way to protect my country from violent attack.
I am supposed to believe that no-bid contracts awarded to companies
owned by members of this Administration, its families and its cronies
is pure coincidence, and that secret meetings resulting in policies
that enrich their supporters to the detriment of hard-working
Americans is good and honest government.
Hold on, because there's MORE of this crap
I am supposed to believe that outsourcing American jobs, under-funding
our educational system, and plunging the country deeper into debt
with every passing day will lead to a stronger, more competitive
nation in the years to come.
I am supposed to believe that the same people who left NOLA to drown,
who refuse to secure our borders, who refuse to implement the
recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and who initiate policies that
incite anger and violence the world over are protecting my country
from harm.
I am supposed to believe that an Administration whose policies make
basic medical care and life-saving drugs unaffordable for millions of
Americans is pro-life.
I am supposed to believe that elected representatives who voted for
the Bankruptcy Bill, tax breaks for wealthy individuals, and tax
subsidies for multi-billion dollar corporations are looking out for
their constituents.
Along with all of the above, I am also supposed to believe that
selling authority over our ports to foreign nations, selling our
national lands to private interests, and selling our children's future
by burdening them with debt for decades to come is in the best
interests of our country.
Drum roll, please -- here's the BIG FINALE ...
I am supposed to believe it is safe to board an airplane with a hold
full of un-inspected cargo as long as no passengers are in possession
of baby formula, that a group of men in Britain were about to take
down ten airliners without tickets or passports, that seven men in
Miami were going to blow up buildings in cities they didn't have the
money to get to, that one lone guy in New York was going to take down
the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow-torch, that if we leave Iraq every
terrorist in the world is going to come to the US and fight us in the
malls and the super-markets, that the 'Liberal media' simply forgets
to cover the lies, cover-ups and corruption of this Administration and
its party members, that voting for a Democrat in Connecticut sends
shockwaves of unbridled encouragement throughout the Muslim world,
that a bunch of PNAC members whose predictions have been proven
totally wrong in every instance should be dictating policy to my
government, that our military isn't stretched too thin and they are
just recalling those who have already fulfilled their duty because
they've got too much time on their hands, and that George W. Bush
spends his summers reading CAMUS and SHAKESPEARE.
Oh, if only I were GULLIBLE, ILL-INFORMED, EASILY LED and TOTALLY
STUPID - what a FINE Bush supporter I would have made!
Author Unknown, but deserves The Medal Of Honor.
(Forwarded from Don Collins)
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"Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
>
> You're talking about bisexuality. Which is not an African American phenomenon.
>
http://www.gay.com/news/article.html?2005/08/17/2
published Wednesday, August 17, 2005
According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly
half of African-American men who have sex with men have been infected with HIV -- and a group
of black leaders is demanding action from the community.
The Black AIDS Institute published an open letter on Wednesday, titled, "Nearly Half of Us May
Already Be Infected. Who Gives a Damn?" It noted that in June the CDC published a study showing
46 percent of black homosexual and bisexual men surveyed in five major cities were already
HIV-positive, an infection rate that was more than twice the infection rate among men of other
races.
"Forty-six percent isn't a catastrophe. It's genocide!" the letter exclaimed. "To make matters
worse, more than two-thirds of the HIV-infected black men in the study were unaware of their
infection. That's right. Half of us may be infected and, of that half, two-thirds don't know it
and so almost certainly aren't doing anything about it."
The open letter was signed by 51 leaders in the black gay community, including "Noah's Arc"
creator and executive producer Patrik-Ian Polk, director/producer Paris Barclay and James Earl
Hardy, author of the "B-Boy Blues" series.
"Where is the outrage?" the leaders asked. "As far as we can tell, following the CDC's
announcement no black or gay media organizations ran front-page stories. No civil rights
organization marched in the streets or called on policy makers to take action. No black
celebrities sponsored relief concerts. There wasn't even a call to action issued by a black gay
and lesbian organization!"
next page >page 1 2 3
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"Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
>
>
> Welcome to the world of closeted bisexuals. So how is this an African American phenomenon?
>
Leaders jolt black gay men against HIV
(Page: 2 of 3)
published Wednesday, August 17, 2005
While the letter's writers admit charges of racism and homophobia could be made, they "may be
beside the point." During a town hall meeting on the "state of black LGBT America" in Los
Angeles in July, the leaders noted, "AIDS was not even on the agenda."
"We have to start a national public discourse among ourselves about this new AIDS reality. We
must create a cultural shift to where knowing your HIV status is the norm, where those of us
who are negative are committed to staying that way and where those of us who are positive
refuse to engage in behavior that might expose our brothers to the virus," the leaders
continued.
"We must all support each other in our collective and individual campaigns to end the epidemic.
Nothing short of an all-out mobilization is acceptable. We must not allow any of the
institutions or businesses that we support to fail to do their part in ending this epidemic.
Most importantly, we must increase our visibility and demand our rightful places in our
communities," the letter added.
"There is a role for all parties to play -- government, the larger black community, the white
LGBT community, our society as a whole -- but we must be willing to hold ourselves accountable
and responsible for our own survival. How can black gay and bisexual or same-gender-loving men
ask others to respond if we continue to be so complacent in the face of our own genocide?" the
letter concluded.
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| " Death" <Death@yourdoor.net> schreef in bericht news:vCQTg.16738$GY5.4914@bignews6.bellsouth.net...
>
> "Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
>
>
> Leaders jolt black gay men against HIV
> (Page: 2 of 3)
>
> published Wednesday, August 17, 2005
> While the letter's writers admit charges of racism and homophobia could be made, they "may be
> beside the point." During a town hall meeting on the "state of black LGBT America" in Los
> Angeles in July, the leaders noted, "AIDS was not even on the agenda."
So bisexuality is not an African American phenomenon. The powers that be are just
engaging in another awareness drive. The type of drive that caused these comparatively
higher numbers for African Americans to appear in the first place.
It is about time that the corporate powers and other groups stop getting a
free ride on African American's powers of organisation and social activism.
> "We have to start a national public discourse among ourselves about this new AIDS reality. We
> must create a cultural shift to where knowing your HIV status is the norm, where those of us
> who are negative are committed to staying that way and where those of us who are positive
> refuse to engage in behavior that might expose our brothers to the virus," the leaders
> continued.
>
> "We must all support each other in our collective and individual campaigns to end the epidemic.
> Nothing short of an all-out mobilization is acceptable. We must not allow any of the
> institutions or businesses that we support to fail to do their part in ending this epidemic.
> Most importantly, we must increase our visibility and demand our rightful places in our
> communities," the letter added.
>
> "There is a role for all parties to play -- government, the larger black community, the white
> LGBT community, our society as a whole -- but we must be willing to hold ourselves accountable
> and responsible for our own survival. How can black gay and bisexual or same-gender-loving men
> ask others to respond if we continue to be so complacent in the face of our own genocide?" the
> letter concluded.
And again, so how is bisexuality an African American phenomenon?
Doesn't the word 'genocide' imply a 'dying out'? Are Black gay men disappearing?
The problem is that this is no different than the nonsense printed about Africa -
hypothetical outcomes projected from skewed data.
Weren't 90% of Americans going to die of AIDS by 1990?
Whatever happened of the 'depopulated villages of Kenya's Rakai region'?
Which country in Africa has a lower population today, than it had
5 years, 10 years, let alone 20 years ago?
None. Zero. There aren't any.
Alex
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| drdach reply:
The probability of HIV transmission in the heterosexual population (low
risk, non-gay, non drug users) is .000004. This is based on military
HIV testing showing probability of .004 in this population and a .001
probability of heterosexual HIV transmission obtained from 7 different
research stuides. Using Bayes theorem, the result is .004 multiplied
by .001 which is .000004
The .000004 is a rather low probability. However, low probability
events can and do happen
The question is: How many hetersexual transmissions can one expect to
find in a population of 100 million sexually active heterosexuals in
the US (assuming one sexual contact by each member of the population)?
To calculate the number of these low probability events in a
population of 200 million , multiply 4 x 10 (-6) with 100 x 10 (6) .
This give a result of 400 events..
For one year, the calculatio is as follows:
Assuming sexual contact twice a week.
Then multiply by 100. The result is 400 x 100 = 40,000
Assuming sexual contact 4 times a week.
Multiply by 200. the result is 80,000
Assuming sexual contact 8 times per week
Multiply by 400. the result is 160,000.
So the result is between 20,000 and 160,000 per year depending on the
number of sexual contacts per week.
The above discussion is not meant to be authoritative. It is intended
as a mathematical exercize which is based on various simplifying
assumptions.
regards from www.drdach.com
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| DavidT 2006-10-01, 4:19 pm |
| Your maths is pretty ropey (see C. Noble for details) but even by your
own estimates, if eveyone has sex twice a week there will be 40 000 new
transmissions of HIV per year in the US?
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"Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
> " Death" <Death@yourdoor.net> schreef in bericht
be[vbcol=seagreen]
>
> So bisexuality is not an African American phenomenon.
Again you say so without anything to back it up with.
>The powers that be
Now there is a convient scapegoat
> are just
> engaging in another awareness drive.
....of black leaders is demanding action from the community.
The Black AIDS Institute published an open letter on Wednesday,...
I see where you are headed.
> The type of drive that caused these comparatively
> higher numbers for African Americans to appear in the first place.
>
LOL, yep, the reporting states are all in a conspiracy
to artificially raise the down low numbers.
Perhaps you can enlighten me as to the reason so many
AA women are infected. AAs are 12 percent of population.
http://www.bcoa.org/facts.html
HIV Statistics
.. For African American men who have sex with men HIV prevalence is estimated at 55% overall
(SFDPH 2001a). Among anonymous testers, prevalence was 9.7% (SFDPHb). Another study found a 29%
prevalence (Catina et al 2001). Collectively, this data suggests that African Americans have
the highest prevalence of any MSM population.
.. The HIV/AIDS infection rate among Black men is 6 times that of white men and the rate among
Black women is 16 times that of white women
.. The number of men with AIDS per 100,000 population includes:
Blacks - 125
Hispanics - 58
Whites - 18
American Indian/Alaska native - 16
Asian/Pacific Islander - 9
.. The number of women with AIDS per 100,000 population includes:
Blacks -50
Hispanics -17
American Indian/Alaska native - 4
Whites - 2
Asian/Pacific Islander - 1
.. AIDS now accounts for 1 in 3 deaths among Black men aged 25 to 4
.. More children with AIDS are Black than all other race and ethnic groups combined
.. Every day in the U.S. about 100 people of color become infected with HIV
.. More than two-thirds of all women in the U.S. who are infected with the AIDS virus are Black
.. Blacks represent 57% of all new AIDS cases in the United States, though comprising only 13%
of the population
.. AIDS is the leading cause of death of Blacks, age 25-44
.. AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women
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|
| DavidT wrote:
> Your maths is pretty ropey (see C. Noble for details) but even by your
> own estimates, if eveyone has sex twice a week there will be 40 000 new
> transmissions of HIV per year in the US?
reply from drdach:
You probably dont understand the calculation because you flunked high
school math. Dont worry, you can take a remidial on line course.
regards from www.drdach.com
| |
| GMCarter 2006-10-01, 9:20 pm |
| On 1 Oct 2006 15:33:53 -0700, "jdach" <drdach@drdach.com> wrote:
>DavidT wrote:
>
>reply from drdach:
>
>You probably dont understand the calculation because you flunked high
>school math. Dont worry, you can take a remidial on line course.
You could use a course in spelling.
| |
|
|
"Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
>
> Doesn't the word 'genocide' imply a 'dying out'? Are Black gay men disappearing?
>
> The problem is that this is no different than the nonsense printed about Africa -
> hypothetical outcomes projected from skewed data.
>
> Whatever happened of the 'depopulated villages of Kenya's Rakai region'?
>
> Which country in Africa has a lower population today, than it had
> 5 years, 10 years, let alone 20 years ago?
>
> None. Zero. There aren't any.
>
The Boston Globe
BYLINE: By Kurt Shillinger, Globe Correspondent
BODY:
JOHANNESBURG - Two million Africans south of the Sahara died of AIDS last year, five times
the number of AIDS-related deaths in the United States since the disease was discovered nearly
two decades ago.
But that is just the beginning of the devastation to come.
More than 22.5 million people in the region carry the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency
virus. Of the 11 people worldwide infected every minute with HIV, 10 of them live in
sub-Saharan Africa. Half of all babies born there are infected with HIV.
Five countries bundled together in southern Africa now form the global epicenter of the
epidemic. South Africa counts 1,600 new infections a day, the highest rate in the world, while
in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland, one in four adults carries HIV. It is estimated
that 90 percent of those infected do not know it, and therefore aren't aware when they might
transmit the virus to their partners.
Within five years, 61 of every 1,000 children born in the five countries won't reach their
first birthday, the United Nations estimates, and by 2001, it is projected that there will be
13 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. Companies are overhiring to keep pace with AIDS
deaths in the labor force.
The statistics indicate what few officials are willing to admit: that this region faces a
crisis of shattered mores, where sexuality is no longer guided by traditional norms. In an
environment where old rules have clashed with, or been eclipsed by, rapid social change,
African men are killing themselves - and their women and children - with sex.
Hiding behind a historical reluctance to speak openly about sex, African political and
religious leaders have failed to acknowledge this deeper cultural crisis at the root of the
AIDS epidemic. And international experts, averse to sounding judgmental or racist, tread
lightly on the epidemic's behavioral undercurrents. Behavior, consequently, has been narrowly
defined as simply having safe sex. But as effective as condoms are in stopping the transmission
of HIV, they do not stop epidemics.
"Without addressing behavior, the response to prevention strategies will always be limited,"
said Elhadj As Sy, head of the United Nations AIDS program for Eastern and Southern Africa,
based in Pretoria. "We'll create some results here and there, but unless there is a fundamental
change in behavior, there will be no drastic change in the evolution of the epidemic."
HIV is transmitted primarily through heterosexual contact in sub-Saharan Africa. The alarming
spread of the disease has been fueled by larger factors: rapid political and economic change,
Westernization, migrant labor, poverty, and gender inequality. Promiscuity, however, is quickly
dismissed in Africa as a racist term: code, in fact, for the myth of the black man's unbridled
libido.
But AIDS experts throughout the region agree that far too little is understood about sexual
dynamics in modern African societies. Important questions thus arise: Why, for example, are
teachers the third highest HIV-infected job group in Namibia, after truckers and the military?
Is a man who lives at home but takes many partners abiding by traditional sexual norms? Why
does HIV spread fastest among youths, the age group most informed about AIDS and condoms?
"People don't want to do this research, so there are patterns of black behavior no one wants to
acknowledge," said Mary Crewe, director of the Center for the Study of AIDS at the University
of Pretoria. "They'd rather lay blame on the apartheid past, which I'm not sure is right."
Contrary to what infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa suggest, HIV is not easy to contract. In
a stable and healthy environment, the probability that an infected man will transmit the virus
to an unprotected woman is less than 2 in 1,000, according to World Bank figures. But it is
easy for that risk to rise. A person afflicted by other sexually transmitted diseases, which
are rampant across the region, is two to nine times more likely to contract HIV if exposed to
it. And if a man has 10 partners, and the partners have each had 10 partners, he's potentially
been exposed to 100 people.
In addition, several socio-economic factors lead to high levels of casual sex in sub-Saharan
Africa, experts say. The region has seen serious upheaval for decades, the past 10 years being
among the most turbulent. Genocide in Rwanda and the end of apartheid in South Africa caused
the movement of masses of people; porous borders, regional development corridors, and political
change have reshaped and extended sexual networks. Poor health care facilities, meanwhile,
leave many without access to quality treatment and prevention, while high unemployment leaves
youths idle.
"When you see such an epidemic as we have, it points to a very stressed society," said Clive
Evian, a South African doctor who helps industries cope with AIDS-related labor costs. "HIV
epidemics go with a package: an emerging economy, transitions from traditional cultures into
industrial economies, high levels of other sexually transmitted diseases, and economic stress
on families."
Among the factors fanning the AIDS epidemic, migrant labor and gender inequities have perhaps
been the most damaging. Throughout the century, men from around the region were drawn or
conscripted to work in distant gold, mineral, and diamond mines. They left their families
behind in rural villages, lived in squalid all-male labor camps, and returned home maybe once a
year. Lacking education and recreation, the men relied on little else but home-brewed alcohol
and sex for leisure.
A man who makes his living deep inside a South African gold mine has a 1 in 40 chance of being
crushed by falling rock, so the delayed risks of HIV seem comparatively remote. Mining
companies pay out $18 million a year in wages to 88,000 workers in the pits of Carletonville,
the center of South Africa's gold industry. The wages buy, among other things, sex. Some 22
percent of adults in Carletonville were HIV-positive in 1998, according to UNAIDS, a rate
two-thirds higher than the national average.
"High alcohol and sexuality are symptoms of things going wrong on a big scale," Evian said.
"They reflect a kind of aggression, the sad social state of the man. They have been thrown into
horrible lives and become frustrated. It would happen to any man anywhere."
Most African women, meanwhile, live in poverty. They have little or no economic control, and
therefore virtually no say in sexual relationships. "Women know they are in danger, but there
is nothing they can do about it," said Lahja Shiimi, HIV/AIDS health program officer in
northern Namibia. "Men decide when to have sex, with whom to have it, and how."
Physiologically four times more susceptible to HIV infection, women in the region are
contracting the virus at a faster rate than men, and at a younger age. Most of the women who
tested positive for HIV in Namibia in 1998, government figures show, were in their early 20s,
while most men were in their mid-30s. According to the latest UNAIDS statistics, 46.7 percent
of Namibian women at rural prenatal clinics tested positive in 1996.
If mobility, migrant labor, and gender imbalance are conducive to the swift spread of HIV, they
also underscore the breakdown of social cohesion. When truckers and miners go home, they take
the virus with them. Sometimes they infect their wives, sometimes women become infected through
sexual contact with other men while their husbands are away. Rural infection rates are catching
up to urban figures. The role men traditionally played as head of the family has broken down.
Boys grow up without fathers. Wives are left impoverished and unprotected. A South African
woman is raped every 26 seconds, the highest rate in the world.
But socio-economic arguments about AIDS do not fully explain how sexual relationships are
changing as African societies evolve. Notions about masculinity and fertility vary widely among
Africa's diverse ethnic groups. Health workers across southern Africa agree, however, that
traditional cultures had strict rules governing sexual relationships. Those codes have broken
down and nothing has replaced them.
"In our culture, having a lot of women is a kind of status," said Milka Mukoroli, the HIV/AIDS
coordinator at Rundu Hospital in Rundu, Namibia. Under the old rules, "a man might marry two or
three women, but he would never stray from home, and the first wife had to be consulted about
each new wife."
Now, Mukoroli said, wives never know about their husbands' other women. Men take lovers
furtively. Many traditional cultures frowned on premarital sex. Today, older men look for young
girls to take care of, seeking sex in exchange for providing school fees and nice clothes,
often in the mistaken belief that sex with virgins can cure AIDS. Health workers say many male
secondary-school teachers sleep with their female students. A new study of Carletonville
conducted by the Pretoria-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research found that 60
percent of women are HIV-positive by the time they are 25. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa,
infection rates among teenage girls are significantly higher than for teenage boys. Infected by
older men, the girls then infect boys their own age.
"Social pressure should be put on older men to avoid forcing or coercing young girls into sex,
or enticing them with sugar daddy gifts," a UNAIDS study on behavior released last month
concluded.
Changing behavioral patterns are not restricted to men, AIDS workers say. Traditionally, women
were not supposed to enjoy sex. Increasingly, however, they are asserting their own sexual
needs and priorities.
"Promiscuity is prevalent predominantly because heterosexual relationships are changing," said
Peter Schmidt, a German doctor serving as chief medical officer in the AIDS-afflicted Ohanguena
region of Namibia. "This is a very sensitive subject and very difficult to tackle. So many
dependencies in African societies relate to sexual relations."
The heterosexual nature of the epidemic does not rule out the probability that HIV is also
transmitted between men, but homosexuality is deeply closeted in African societies and there
are comparatively far fewer same-sex infections, according to AIDS experts.
Youths provide a compelling reason to think differently about behavior. Across the region,
young people have been exposed to more education about HIV and condoms than their elders, yet
they have the highest infection rates. Knowledge about risk and condoms hasn't slowed the
epidemic.
A new study of sexual behavior among youths between the ages of 11 and 24 in KwaZulu-Natal,
South Africa's hardest hit province, indicates why: Young people are on their own in an
aggressive and evolving sexual environment without the communication skills necessary to
negotiate the function or frequency of sex in relationships.
Consequently, the social ills governing gender relations among adults reappear among youths.
Both men and women in the study said that condoms threatened trust within the relationship.
Most women said they were powerless against male sexual coercion. Many from both sexes said
they would prefer abstinence or monogamy, but said peer pressure is a strong influence.
"For young people, sex is a must to be taken seriously by their peers," said Christine Varga,
research fellow at the Australian National university in Canberra, currently based at the
Reproductive Health Research Unit in Durban.
Significantly, said Varga, who conducted the KwaZulu-Natal study, young people feel
increasingly isolated from the adults in their lives. Traditionally, cultures included some
mechanism for passing on the rules of sexuality and intimate relationships to adolescents.
Parents, however, never spoke to their children about sex. Unmarried aunts or older sisters
informed younger nieces or sisters coming of age. Uncles and older brothers did the same for
boys.
Now confusion prevails. Rural youths in particular "are much more likely to evince attitudes
that are a combination of old conservatism and new sexuality," Varga said. They combine new
attitudes like "sex is a must" with traditional mores such as "condoms are for prostitutes."
The result is high-risk sex.
From 1997 to 1998, infections rose 65 percent among South Africans between the ages of 15 and
19. All too quickly, HIV is claiming another generation.
"The way to fight the epidemic is not just with condoms. We have to change mores," said
Patricio Rojas, the World Health Organization representative in Namibia. "Openness happened
fast in Africa, and it happened wrongly. There is no grooming of boys and girls as partners in
a relationship, so sex has no aspects beyond the instinctively physical. We have to create an
environment of normality again."
BYLINE: By Wil Haygood, Globe Staff
BODY:
JOHANNESBURG - Hector was a nobody with few girls. And so he got them. For the price of a
warm beer he had a bedtime partner every night. He'd boast of his conquests like so many boys
in this country boast of their moves on green soccer fields.
Hector's dying now.
Colin found his women in the bars of Hillbrow, the section of Johannesburg where white liberals
used to congregate during the mean days of apartheid. These days a lot of flesh gets peddled in
Hillbrow. Colin found girl after girl after girl.
Colin's dying now.
Pete and Sonny Boy couldn't stop themselves from bedding women. Their fathers bedded many
women. Sex and more sex was due them, they felt. A rite of passage.
Pete's dying now, and his girlfriend, Queen, is already dead. She lies in a township graveyard,
right alongside their son, Manietjies, who was 6. They called him little Pete. Little Pete died
four months ago of AIDS. Just like his mother.
The deaths made Sonny Boy blue. But he swears he'll save big Pete. Big Pete is skinny as wheat.
One hundred and five pounds, and dropping. Sonny Boy needs some fresh fruit and vegetables for
Pete, but doesn't have a dime in his pocket. Still, he believes in miracles. "I will care for
Pete," Sonny Boy swears. "You will see."
Sonny Boy could use a miracle himself. He's dying too.
This is now the land of the dying and the dead. They're all victims of AIDS.
As the AIDS scourge sweeps a wicked path across the continent, health experts predict that 50
percent of all new infections in Africa will take place right here, in battle-torn South
Africa.
"Most women in this country know their husbands or boyfriends have multiple partners," says
Morna Cornell of the Johannesburg-based AIDS Consortium, a clearinghouse for organizations
fighting the epidemic. Cornell estimates that in the next five to 10 years, 3.5 million people
will die of AIDS in South Africa. "It's on a scale unimaginable to anybody else," she says.
Bart Cox, an AIDS activist here, says that "it's interesting to talk about promiscuity, but
very risky, even dangerous. So many of these young black males feel a sense of entitlement.
Meaning, if they see a woman as dressing sexy, they think they are entitled to her."
All tuckered out and dying, Pete hates that his sexual vigor is not what it used to be. Not
that his new girlfriend knows he's infected. "I met her one day and had sex the following day,"
Pete says, letting a guilt-free smile flower across his face.
BYLINE: By Wil Haygood, Globe Staff
BODY:
CARLETONVILLE, South Africa - Ten women are striding up a dirt road in this old mining town.
Emily Ntsekawla is giggling, kicking at weeds. Gladys Nicholas, all lipsticked up, is scanning
the distance. It's midafternoon. The air is clear and the ladies are going to work.
They reach an opening in the middle of the adjacent bush and take seats on tin cans. A few have
condoms in the palms of their hands. There's a tall and lean miner coming just now. Nicholas
chats with the miner. Then she vanishes with him into the bush, twisting like a schoolgirl.
The women are prostitutes. And out here, in a stretch of rural landscape about 45 miles west of
Johannesburg, it is mean work. Malaria-causing mosquitoes are one thing; the real possibility
of robbery another. But the most lethal revelation is this: Carletonville has one of the
highest rates of AIDS in the world.
"In young women 25 years old and under, two out of three of them are already infected with
AIDS" in Carletonville, says Brian Williams, a researcher at the university of Pretoria who has
been studying the area for the past year. "So, two out of three girls will die before the age
of 30."
Health officials say prostitution is playing a key role in fueling the AIDS crisis in
sub-Saharan Africa.
But Emily Ntsekawla, a prostitute who is 22, doesn't pay much attention to statistics, or
mortality rates. She's more concerned with everyday survival out here in the bush.
"Sometimes you get somebody who takes your money and runs," she says.
Thugs shot Ntsekawla six times earlier this year. "I was praying that God would take me," she
says. "I was in such pain."
Ntsekawla wears a crude surgically-implanted metal device in her left arm that helps heal the
bones that were shattered from the shooting.
"This is like a no man's land, so you have gangsters who put themselves into a position of
governing," says Zodwa Mzaidume, a counselor with the Mothusimpilo Outreach Project, an AIDS
educational program funded by the American and British governments.
Mzaidume has been teaching the women about safe-sex practices. Mzaidume confesses she can't
watch every woman going into the bush, and knows that not all of them will insist that the men
use condoms.
"Nobody protects the women," she says. "They are open to any type of harassment - police or
criminal. Some guys even rape them."
The women - who prefer the title "sex worker" - all live three miles down the road, in
Leeupoort, a squatter camp that one can only enter by traversing wicked dirt roads. There is no
electricity or running water in Leeupoort. Someone has scrawled "Tigers Don't Cry" on the side
of one of the dwellings, as if to underscore that this is no place for the faint of heart.
There are 150 sex workers who live in the squatter camp. Many have their children with them,
kids who can be seen scooting around in the dust during the day.
"The hot stuff is 20 rand," says Emily Ntsekawla. "The cold stuff is 6 rand."
The hot stuff is sex. The cold stuff is beer. Twenty rand is the equivalent of about three
American dollars.
"There's no time for intimacy," says Mzaidume, the outreach counselor. "It's pay and go."
Mzaidume is still grieving over Tstelele Phuteho. Phuteho drove the van for her program,
delivering condoms to the ladies in the bush. Hoodlums robbed the condom deliverer and shot him
dead in April. "I come in here knowing very well that something could happen to me," Mzaidume
says, after hiking into the bush one recent afternoon to check on the women.
They are never short of customers. There are three shifts of miners at nearby Goldfields Mines,
which employs more than 7,000 people. Most of the miners are migrants who live in hostels on
the mine company's property.
"You've got men living in single-sex hostels without their wives," says Williams, the
University of Pretoria researcher. "What do you think they're going to do, play backgammon?"
Mzaidume has been dispensing more than 80,000 condoms a month, trying to stem the staggering
rate of AIDS infection in this area.
"When I first met these sex workers," she says, "they knew nothing about AIDS or STD's
(sexually transmitted diseases). It took me three months to get them to accept me."
Xoliswa Jaho, who is 36, has worked here for three years, after arriving from Cape Town. "I was
working in the kitchen of a house," she says, adding that by working as a prostitute, she
easily quadruples the salary she would have made continuing to work as a domestic.
Khanyisiele Hlongwene, 23, says the work is not that grueling. "Some men look at me and
discharge before they even touch me," she says, laughing.
Gladys Nicholas, whose family thinks she is scouring the country, job hunting, has dreams. "My
dream is always to get a better job than a sex worker," she says. "I would like to have a
clerical job."
In recent months, Nicholas, Hlongwene, Jaho, and the other women here have had to dig into
their savings for coffins and train fare. Three of their colleagues fell dead from AIDS. The
bodies had to be shipped back to their families.
BYLINE: By Wil Haygood, Globe Staff
SOWETO, South Africa - Her day started beautifully.
Portia Moalusi was out for a stroll with her boyfriend. They were holding hands, chatting,
smiling, just strolling around this old epic-sized township on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
It was a Sunday this past June.
"I saw two people walking," she says. "I thought they were lovers. When I started to turn a
corner, they approached me with guns."
She's sitting in a clinic here, meeting with her doctor.
She goes on:
"I said, 'What do you want? I can give you my necklace.' "
The gun-wielding couple - immediately joined by another male - didn't want her necklace.
Moalusi's boyfriend was told, at gunpoint, to flee. He did.
She was hustled into a car. She was blindfolded. Her heart pounded. The car came to a halt. It
was at the edge of a river.
Moalusi knew what the men wanted. The woman helped hold her down.
"Before they started raping me, they pushed my head into the water," she says. "I felt myself
drowning."
Her doctor, Mary Jane Kumasamba - who has heard some evil tales of crime and rape while working
as a doctor here - grimaces. There were deep genital bruises on Moalusi when the doctor first
examined her.
"We were shocked by the story," the doctor says. "This is like Sodom and Gomorrah."
Portia Moalusi is 29 years old. She's single and unemployed. She has close-cropped hair and
small hands, which she keeps folding and unfolding in her lap.
"I told myself I would cooperate because they told me they would kill me," Moalusi says about
her abductors.
She said she was repeatedly raped by the men, and recalls quite vividly the words of the last
man who attacked her. "After he raped me, he said to me, 'I've got something to tell you. I'm
HIV-positive.' I was in shock."
A rape occurs every 26 seconds in South Africa, the highest rate of rape in the world, and the
country's rate of 1,600 HIV infections per day is also the highest in the world, more than 14
times greater than in the United States. While there are no numbers relating the astonishing
AIDS figures in South Africa directly to rape, no one denies that sexual assaults are adding to
the problem significantly.
On this afternoon, Portia Moalusi is waiting for HIV test results at a clinic on the grounds of
the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. The clinic deals with rape and child abuse cases. Moalusi
and her doctor have agreed to let a reporter sit in while they wait.
When Moalusi came to the clinic, Dr. Kumasamba did something she was not supposed to do: She
opened the anti retro-viral "starter kit" she keeps in the clinic - in case any staff member is
exposed to blood - and gave it to Moalusi. The starter kit consists of two potent drugs that if
given immediately can often halt the virus in its tracks. In giving the medicine to Moalusi,
Kumasamba left herself and the clinic without any of the drug. "I knew I was going to be in
trouble," she says, "but there was a life to save."
Kumasamba has two large spiral notebooks. They detail the date of all reported rapes and the
names of the victims. They also report the results of the AIDS tests for those who were raped.
More than half are given the dreadful news that they are HIV-positive.
There is a police officer on duty 24 hours a day at the clinic. Kumasamba's job is dangerous.
When the police arrest someone, she often testifies on behalf of rape victims, going eye to eye
with the accused in the courtroom. But the police have so far made no arrests in Portia's rape.
After an hour-long wait, the sounds of clicking heels can be heard coming down the hallway. The
door opens.
"The results are negative," says Sally Mbulaheni, a nurse, who is allowing herself a smile as
she reports the news.
The doctor hugs Moalusi. "You made it," the doctor says. Moalusi covers her face in her hands,
overcome with emotion. "I'm so happy," she says.
"It's a victory for us," Kumasamba says.
The doctor couldn't bear - at least in Moalusi's presence - to talk about reality. The reality
is that Moalusi's first test results, while gratifying, could take a bitter turn. It can take
up to six months after an infection for the virus to be detected. "She might still be
positive," the doctor would say.
Later in the afternoon of the day she received her test results, Moalusi, standing in front of
her home, twirled like a little child. Then she vanished with something approaching happiness
on her face.
BYLINE: By Kurt Shillinger, Globe Correspondent
BODY:
RUNDU, Namibia - On a continent where the common official response to the AIDS plague is
denial, Bishop Joseph Sikongo speaks with rare candor.
"Nobody has been outspoken," the Roman Catholic elder said in an interview here, referring to
government leaders as well as his ecclesiastical brethren. "Just now, when we see people dying,
we are beginning to pay attention. But we have not been focused, and we have failed to meet our
responsibility."
Every year, AIDS kills 10 times more Africans than die in wars annually, and poses the single
biggest threat to development on the continent, yet very few leaders - in parliament or the pul
pit - have anything to say about it. Sub-Saharan countries spend about $160 million fighting 4
million new AIDS cases per year, and most of that is foreign aid, according to US government
figures. By contrast, the United States spends $880 million on just 44,000 new cases annually.
"By any measure, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is the most terrible undeclared war in the world, with
the whole of sub-Saharan Africa a killing field," said UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy
last month in Zambia in a speech at the annual conference on AIDS in Africa.
Strikingly, no African heads of state attended the Lusaka meeting, the most important periodic
conference on the African AIDS epidemic. Not even Zambian President Frederick Chiluba, whose
office is just minutes away.
"There is a need for political commitment at the highest level, and little explanation for why
that commitment is not there," said John Caldwell, who attended the conference as an expert on
Africa from the Australian National university in Canberra. "AIDS must be the central issue on
the African political agenda."
A few African leaders, such as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and Ethiopia's Negasso Gidada, have
begun to move the AIDS epidemic higher on their priority lists. But most remain silent or pay
the problem lip service, leaving the international community and underfunded private
organizations to confront it.
This reticence has had dire consequences. Existing AIDS-related laws are not enforced, allowing
discrimination to go unchecked. Stigmas endure. Treatments remain costly and inaccessible. Rape
and other sexual violence flourish. Insurance companies refuse to cover people infected by the
human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, and withhold benefits to families of
policyholders who have died of the disease. Half-hearted education efforts make little impact
on risky behavior.
These factors "drive the epidemic underground," where it continues its sweep through the
population, said Mark Heywood, director of the AIDS Law Project at the university of the
Witswatersrand in Johannesburg.
More than 15 years into the now-raging AIDS epidemic, as African countries strive to cope with
the burden of rising death rates, official denial is hard to fathom. AIDS, it is widely
suspected, has taken a personal toll at the highest levels of government. Corridors buzz in
every country with stories of ranking politicians who have died or lost family members to
untimely deaths. Namibian President Sam Nujoma lost two sons and a daughter-in-law. Bennie
Mwiinga, Zambia's minister of local government and housing, died on the eve of the AIDS
conference last month, leaving delegates to speculate about the end of a young and prominent
political figure.
In each case, the official cause of death was listed as something else, though Western
diplomats and some African health experts all said privately that AIDS was the culprit. Former
Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda admitted that he lost a son to the disease, and the preeminent
South African judge Edwin Cameron has disclosed his positive HIV status. But Africa, sadly,
still awaits its Magic Johnson, someone of mass popular appeal stepping forward with personal
testimony to break the myth and stigmas of the epidemic, to say unequivocally that AIDS affects
everyone.
"These leaders don't understand that they just leave people laboring to explain why they are
silent," said Beatrice Were of Uganda's International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS,
an advocacy group. "They deepen the stigmas attached to AIDS."
The silence may be rooted in fear of failure. African leaders do nothing, Caldwell argues,
because they think they cannot influence the sexual behavior of their most important
constituency: young and middle-aged men. They may also be bound by traditional African taboos
about sex. Such issues are seldom brought into the open, let alone discussed between partners.
Few couples, experts on African sexuality say, communicate about the role of sex within their
own relationships.
As former South African President Nelson Mandela said last March in one of his last official
comments about AIDS, "HIV/AIDS is one of those critical issues which demand visible leadership.
.. . . Why understand why there is this silence? It is because transmission occurs primarily
through sex, which is not openly discussed."
Martin Foreman, director of the AIDS project at the Panos Institute, a London-based research
center, raises another possible reason for official reticence: traditional notions about
African masculinity. Men, he argues, are supposed to be emotionally and physically strong. Many
cultures expect men to have multiple sexual partners. Powerful leaders see the AIDS epidemic as
threatening their status, both as men and as officeholders, Foreman said.
"The fact that no heads of state went to the Lusaka meeting is a negative sign. It is not
coincidential that they are all men," Foreman added. "Political, community, and religious
leaders in Africa are men. The male self-identity is dependent on the sexual identity. For many
men, any attempt to discuss and restrict sex belittles their masculinity. That's part of what's
going on."
Whatever the reason, the lack of political will has had measureable consequences. In study
after study across sub-Saharan Africa, most people indicate that they have a basic knowledge of
how HIV spreads, how to block transmission, and that the virus is lethal. But they also do not
perceive themselves to be in danger. While an increase in knowledge about HIV and AIDS has
resulted in marked changes in sexual behavior in countries like the Netherlands, Australia, and
Thailand, awareness has not resulted in a decrease in high-risk behavior in the majority of
sub-Saharan African countries.
"The knowledge of HIV is high, but disassociated with risk," said Karen Tate of the information
and education department of the Ministry of Health in Rundu, one of the most affected areas in
Namibia. "So even if people say they know about HIV, there is a gap between that knowledge and
behavior. Behavior is based on immediate needs," rather than prevention of something that poses
delayed risks.
Infection rates remain stubbornly high as a result, especially among the youngest age groups of
sexually active adults, ironically, those most aware of the dangers of the virus and how to
protect themselves.
Ten African countries, most represented by their health ministers, declared AIDS a national
disaster during the Zambia conference last month. They committed themselves to providing more
political leadership, increasing resources devoted to a national response to the epidemic, and
making HIV/AIDS a priority in all developmental programs. They also vowed to introduce
initiatives to address behavior and encourage discussion to create a more supportive
environment for those infected and dying.
"What's coming through is that there is starting to be accountability at the highest level,"
said UNAIDS director Peter Piot in an interview. "But denial is still a fundamental aspect of
the epidemic. Some African leaders are speaking out, in some places the machinery is in motion,
but that doesn't mean we have action."
The new resolve spelled out in the declaration also begs questions about how African countries
apply AIDS-related laws and policies already on their books, as well as about the budgetary
decisions they make. In 1997, the countries of the Southern African Development Community, a
trade bloc, adopted a code for HIV/AIDS and employment, agreeing to incorporate its provisions
in national legislation.
Requiring important education programs and protection of workers' rights, the code aims "to
ensure nondiscrimination between individuals with HIV infection and those without, and between
HIV/AIDS and other comparable health/medical conditions."
But national priorities have not reflected adherence to the best intentions of the code. South
Africa has one of the world's most liberal constitutions, but its military is one of the
leading discriminators against people with HIV/AIDS. People must submit to mandatory HIV
screening and test negative prior to being allowed into the service.
AIDS activists believe one of the best ways to lessen the stigma attached to HIV is to assure
confidentiality. Yet several countries have engaged in new debate this year on whether
disclosure promotes the common good. Politicians argue that notification meets a society's need
to monitor the epidemic. Speaking after a regional meeting of health ministers in April,
Namibian Health Minister Libertina Amathila said "the situation as it is now protects only the
sufferers but not the community. The special confidentiality accorded afflicted people
encourages them to infect others at random without being detected."
Many AIDS experts denounce such arguments, saying that confidentiality is essential to
encouraging people to learn their status and inform their partners. Notification to interested
parties such as employers, they say, is a fundamental violation of the right to privacy and
only promotes discrimination. In South Africa, a government proposal would require any health
care worker who diagnoses a person as HIV-positive to file a report containing the patient's
age, sex, race, medical condition, and "probable source and place of infection." It also would
force the health officer to inform family members and others giving care to the patient. The
initiative is pending.
"Eliminating stigma must be central in the response to AIDS," Piot said at the Zambia
conference. "We know that three things contribute most to people learning and acting
responsibly on their status, and thus protecting their community. First, access to confidential
counseling and testing. Second, understanding of the incentives to do so. And third, the level
of support in the environment in which they live."
Another area of discrimination involves insurance. Underwriting companies, bracing against the
rising costs of AIDS, often refuse to cover HIV-positive people or pay benefits to
policyholders who die of AIDS. Across sub-Saharan Africa, doctors often omit AIDS as a cause of
death, indicating on death certificates some other related illness to help families recover
insurance benefits.
For countries that have begun to implement more serious national responses to the epidemic,
Uganda is the model. One of the first to face a full-blown crisis, the east-African state has
been hailed as a success story. President Yoweri Museveni was outspoken about HIV long before
any of his counterparts, and mobilized his government to treat AIDS as a concern for all
ministries and sectors. The country encourages people to have confidential HIV tests prior to
marriage and promotes community-based care for those ailing from advancing AIDS.
After reaching a peak in the early 1990s, when as many as 36.6 percent of urban pregnant women
tested positive for HIV, Uganda has apparently reversed infection rates. By the end of 1997,
only 14.8 percent of women attending urban clinics had HIV.
Few argue with the importance of making AIDS a priority in every government department, as well
as teaming up with the private and volunteer sectors. Namibia and South Africa have begun to
adopt that approach.
In March, Namibian President Nujoma launched a national campaign against HIV/AIDS that called
for a coordinated strategy at the national, regional, and local levels. The plan spells out
goals for improved health care, education, and antidiscrimination measures. But the government
has allocated only $3.5 million to implement it over five years, and interviews around the
country with officials responsible for putting the plan to work reveal an ignorance about what
specifically the various programs are supposed to accomplish once they have been established.
Of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa faces the fastest-growing AIDS crisis:
1,600 people contract HIV every day, and within five years more than six million South Africans
will have the virus out of a population of 40 million.
But the country is also the best equipped to respond to the disease. South Africa has the
strongest economy in Africa and the most sophisticated infrastructure. Still, its response has
been slow. Warnings of an impending catastrophy early in the decade, when there was still time
to avert the worst, went unheeded amid intense negotiations to end apartheid and the opening
years of majority rule. It wasn't until the closing months of Mandela's presidency when, last
October, then-Deputy President Mbeki outlined a national response.
Even then, South Africa allocated only about $13 million to AIDS-related education and care
programs over five years. By contrast, the government is spending roughly $6.5 billion on new
military hardware, including three German submarines for a navy that faces no threat.
Mbeki, now president, shows signs of understanding the threat AIDS poses to his goals of
improving the lives of the impoverished black majority. But government is still more focused on
the medical aspects of HIV/AIDS, rather than on behavior and care and assistance for people
with HIV and their families. South Africa, for example, will spend more than $10 million over
the next three years on vaccine research for the subtype of the HIV virus most prevalent in the
region.
Government officials, critics say, also show a surprising lack of knowledge about the epidemic.
The new health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, won accolades for traveling to Uganda
shortly after assuming office in June to learn from that country's experience. But her major
initiative so far has been to rally religious leaders to help build awareness from the pulpit,
despite the numerous studies indicating that ignorance is no longer a critical problem.
Tshabalala-Msimang did not respond to requests for an interview.
In August the education ministry published new rules pertaining to HIV in schools. The policy
outlines in detail how to administer first aid to superficial wounds, despite acknowledging
that HIV is rarely transmitted through casual contact with open cuts. Conspicuously absent are
specific guidelines for sex education in the classroom and punitive measures for teachers
caught having sex with students.
Asked to explain these omissions last week, education Minister Kader Asmal said "these are
matters for further discussion." He added: "Teachers are embarrassed to give the facts, but the
taboos must give way."
The country is only just now beginning to deal seriously with violence against women, one of
the most menacing causes for the spread of HIV. Despite new legislation broadening the
definition of rape - a woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa - and imposing new
minimum sentencing requirements, courts still show surprisingly callous attitudes.
In August, a high court judge in Bloemfontein sentenced a 23-year-old man previously convicted
of a sex-offense to just 10 years in prison for abducting and repeatedly raping two 15-year-old
girls. In his ruling, Judge Dirk Kotze argued that the attacks were simply the result of the
man's virility, and that the victims were not virgins at the time they were raped.
For their part, religious leaders throughout sub-Saharan Africa have been mostly silent about
the epidemic, despite the obvious role they could play in addressing behavior, counseling, and
caring for orphans. Bishop Sikongo in Rundu says part of the reason is condoms. The Roman
Catholic Church, for example, won't advocate condoms because they interfere with conception,
and because such a stance might appear to be condoning types of sexual behavior that do not
conform with church doctrine. Not knowing how else to respond, Sikongo said, his brethren have
done nothing.
"Condoms are the easy way out," he said. "They don't require sexual responsibility. We would
like to see the human take charge of himself. But we have not promoted our view vigorously."
The Rev. Barry Hughes-Gibbs, an Anglican priest near Pretoria, has been providing care for
HIV-infected adults, children, and their families since 1994. The people he helps live in
abject poverty, and the premise of his project is to help them move from dependence to a degree
of self-suffficiency. In addition to feeding and treating patients, he also employs them in the
program.
Hughes-Gibbs' program relies on foreign donors and receives no help from the government.
Earlier this year, without explanation, Gauteng Province stopped sending subsidies - about $50
per adult and $150 per child. Nor does his own organization support him. Hughes-Gibbs
half-jokingly says the project, which currently cares for 2,500 children and more than 4,000
adults, is successful because it isn't tied to the church.
"The church, and by that I don't just mean my own, is doing nothing," he said. "There are a few
in the clergy who are fighting rifles-against-tanks battles. But most give AIDS lip service at
best, and many deny that it is in their own congregations."
In the absence of commitment from political and religious leaders, nongovernmental
organizations are left to do the heavy work of testing, counseling, and caring for those with
HIV and AIDS. And communities have begun finding innovative ways to address the epidemic at
their level.
Some Zulu villages hold ceremonies to test boys and girls for virginity. If they pass they are
given certificates and special status. Others act out the dangers and consequences of AIDS
through traditional dances.
"People are not putting enough pressure on African governments," Caldwell said at last month's
conference in Zambia. "African governments are not putting enough pressure on Western
governments and international systems. The conspiracy of silenc§anc0000e must be broken."
BYLINE: By Kurt Shillinger, Globe Correspondent
BODY:
LUSAKA, Zambia - Though physically small, Kabanda Syamalevwe was once the kind of man who
embodied his Tonga tribe's ideals of masculinity. He ruled his wife and children as lord and
master. He took other women. His peers, he recalls now with laughter, called him a bull.
But one afternoon in 1993 his world collapsed. A friend walked into a bar where Syamalevwe was
having a few drinks and showed him a story in the local newspaper revaling that a school
teacher had tested positive for HIV. The woman in the accompanying photo was his wife.
"Imagine the feeling of helplessness and uselessness," he said during a recent interview.
For most African women, having the AIDS virus is a multiple curse. It can lead to rejection and
violence. Most women contract HIV from their husbands or boyfriends, but few men willingly
accept responsibility. At the time Brigitte Syamalevwe learned she carried the AIDS virus, she
and Kabanda had been married for 21 years. She had never strayed. Both knew he was the source
of her infection.
Instead of destroying their marriage, however, the personal crisis of HIV started the
Syamalevwes on the kind of long and fundamental reassessment of their attitudes about sexuality
and marriage that experts increasingly believe is the only true solution to Africa's AIDS
epidemic. It is a process that involves breaking old molds, elevating the status of women at
home and in society, and redefining what it means to be a man.
"Men must be confronted with change," said Kabanda, a former health clinic officer. "Our
cultural upbringing has a bearing on our sexual patterns. So we need to focus on how social
expectations shape our behavior as men and women."
In the six years since they learned they were infected, Brigitte and Kabanda, who live in the
northern Zambian town of Kitwe, have tried to understand why men behave the way they do, how
women contribute to that behavior, and how to change. Both are now involved in community-based
HIV/AIDS education. In their spare time, and with their own resources, they run workshops for
men and women on sexuality and marriage.
They are now in the process of creating Africa's first Society of Men Against AIDS, a male
version of programs in countries like Senegal that encourage open discussion about behavior and
AIDS among women.
As their story spreads, the Syamalevwes are quickly becoming a model for how to change sexual
dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. Responses to the AIDS crisis in the region have tended to focus
on women because they are more vulnerable and also more likely to attend clinics and obtain
information. But that has not slowed the epidemic, and a consensus is beginning to grow that
more emphasis needs to be placed on male behavior. A study released last month at an
international AIDS conference in Zambia, for example, indicated that 80 percent of men in that
country have multiple sexual partners.
"Men are the cutting edge," said Salif Sow, an expert on infectious diseases at Dakar
University in Senegal. "The problem is that we're always talking about women, but they don't
have the power to protect themselves. Men are the key to HIV transmission."
At the conference last month in Lusaka, Zambian Health Minister Nkandu Luo actually suggested
that the time had come for African women to riot against men. But the Syamalevwes have a
different approach: they work with each other to overcome the kind of gender inequities that
have helped AIDS to flourish.
It hasn't always been easy. The paternalistic influences of Kabanda's Tonga tribe left deep
marks on their marriage. His father had three wives. Men were taught to be physically strong
and emotionally remote. Women were to be weak.
"If I called him on an issue, he would punish me by coming back home later than usual,"
Brigitte said. "It threatened him."
HIV changed the scenario. Brigitte had herself tested against Kabanda's wishes, and then did
not tell him. She had seen some of her students struggle with losing their parents to AIDS, and
worried about how her own children would cope in the same situation. After Kabanda read the
story in the newspaper, it took several months for him to muster the courage to find out his
own status.
Faced with the sudden prospect of shortened lives, the couple began breaking free from
prescribed molds. Kabanda paid less heed to peer pressure, stopped sleeping around, and took a
more active role in raising the couple's 11 children. He became more supportive of Brigitte's
career and flouted a traditional taboo by having a vasectomy.
Brigitte also changed. She became more assertive. Whatever Kabanda expected of her, she held
him accountable as well. "Women are collaborators in their own servitude," she said. "Pregnant
women are emotionally weakened in the relationship, so I was Kabanda's slave for a long time.
This experience has given me a chance to get liberated from men, to become an equal partner."
The Syamalevwes are a rare case. Kabanda was willing to make changes. Most Africans find it
hard to discuss sex openly, and many women risk violence, blame, and rejection for having HIV.
The couple say they talk about sex and AIDS with their family, but so far have not insisted
that their children be tested for HIV.
In one of their first workshops, in 1994, Brigitte and Kabanda asked the women to go home that
night and ask their men for sex, knowing that their culture frowns on women who do so. The next
day, 23 of the 24 women reported being harassed over the request.
"It should be appreciated that in our culture, promiscuity is associated with women," Kabanda
said. "It was never in our vocabulary to say that men were promiscuous. They reject it because
of what the word attaches to their masculinity and superiority."
A groundbreaking program in Botswana underscores how difficult it is to change deeply-rooted
attitudes. Over the past 18 months, the Norwegian-funded Men, Sex, and AIDS has run workshops
to encourage men to talk openly about sexuality. Pilot programs modeled after the project are
scheduled to start next month in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland.
By the end of each three-day workshop, most of the men overcome their initial shyness. But it
is too early to tell if the work will lead to changes in behavior.
"Men are difficult to reach. They don't go to clinics and can't be bothered to get
information," said MacDonald Maswabi, the program's director, in a phone interview from
Botswana's capital, Gabarone. "So our main concern for now is creating a place where men can go
without being labeled. Many of the men at our workshops admit they need to change their
lifestyle, but it will take a very long time, assuming we do have an impact."
The Syamalevwes, however, say that it is often the men who reject or ridicule their message
publicly who come back privately for help. Many men are afraid to show weakness, they say, and
conform to peer pressure. But what Brigitte tells them is simple: "You don't lose your manhood
through good actions."
BYLINE: By Wil Haygood, Globe Staff
BODY:
Stunned by the soaring number of AIDS deaths in Africa, where more than 12 million lives
have already been lost, American black leaders are scrambling to call attention to the crisis,
and concluding that they themselves must exercise more vigor and ingenuity in confronting the
epidemic.
"People have been slow to recognize the changing face of AIDS, and therefore the changing
politics of AIDS," says Ron Dellums, the former California congressman who was a leader in
forcing economic sanctions against the old apartheid regime in South Africa. Dellums now heads
the Washington, D.C.-based Constituency for Africa, an advocacy group whose mission for the
next year, he says, will be to try to focus American attention on the AIDS crisis in Africa.
After returning from a recent trip to Africa, Dellums rolled from pulpit to pulpit across black
America, confronting church leaders. "I said, 'Look folks, 12 million Africans have already
died. You should stand up with moral outrage.' The reaction of people was, 'My God, I had no
idea,' " Dellums says. "What this issue has lacked is people prepared to talk loud enough to
take it to a political level."
In addition to those who have already died of AIDS, it is estimated that upwards of 22 million
people are infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The crisis has gotten so grave that in
Zimbabwe, one of the most besieged countries, many funeral homes now keep their doors open 24
hours a day.
"With ferocious speed, AIDS has wiped out many of the development gains Africa has achieved
over the last two decades," said Calisto Madavo, a Zimbabwean who is the World Bank's vice
president for Africa. Speaking at an international conference on the epidemic held in Zambia
last month, Madavo said AIDS was "killing adults in the prime of their working and parenting
lives, decimating the workforce, fracturing and impoverishing families, orphaning millions, and
shredding the fabric of communities . . . . It has reduced life expectancy in the most-affected
areas and now threatens businesses and economies."
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, America's oldest civil rights
organization, recently passed a resolution vowing to pay more attention to the AIDS scourge in
Africa.
"For many years the NAACP didn't do enough about AIDS," concedes Julian Bond, chairman of the
organization's board of directors. "I don't think anyone in the US, the NAACP included, is
doing enough about AIDS in America, let alone Africa."
That admitted shortcoming, and other we-must-catch-up sentiments echoed by black leaders, is
being seized upon by Eugene Rivers, the peripatetic Boston minister who has long felt
comfortable bumping heads with old-guard civil rights leaders and their practiced orthodoxy.
Rivers is leading his upstart 21st Century Group into the heart of the Africa AIDS debate by
trying to place the issue at the top of black America's post-civil rights agenda, and by
assailing many American black leaders as "exhausted" or suffering from a "crisis of vision."
Rivers calls 21st Century the "intellectual arm" of his 10-Point Coalition, which has long
battled crime in Boston's urban areas. Rivers sees sexual promiscuity in Africa as a form of
violence against women that is mainly to blame for the astonishing rate of AIDS deaths on the
continent. He is planning a series of nationwide forums to increase public awareness, political
advocacy, and humanitarian assistance, both in America and Africa.
"We want to give the issue of AIDS and sexual behavior the same level of visibility that a
previous generation gave apartheid in South Africa," he says.
Rivers has also been recruiting some prominent national figures to his cause, among them Bishop
Charles E. Blake of the 18,000-member West Angeles Church of God In Christ.
"The Africans, based on my observations there, are very religious people," Blake says. "Many
are very responsive to Christianity. They would be influenced by a message that had Christian
morality attached to it. If Gene saves only 10 people with his message, that would be great.
But I'm sure it will be greater numbers.
"It is time for us to link up city to city," Blake says of those congregations wishing to focus
attention on AIDS in Africa.
Rivers recognizes that his inflammatory charge that many African men are promiscuous, and his
call for abstinence, may win him unlikely allies among some white conservatives, moralists, and
other so-called Eurocentrics - thereby alienating his liberal, civil rights base.
"Where the argument has merit, it will be addressed," he says of possible criticism. "When they
are obviously partisan, they will be ignored."
But seminars, conferences, and resolutions about AIDS are meaningless, according to Rivers, if
the issue of promiscuity isn't broached.
"The behavior dimension of this is the third rail," Rivers says. "That's the one no one wants
to touch."
Bond denies that promiscuity is taboo. "I've heard people talk about this," he says. "In a
speech I am currently giving, I quote (W.E.B.) Du Bois talking about 'a loss of ancient African
chastity.' I heard Jesse Jackson talk about this. Maybe it's not talked about enough."
Eva Thorne, a member of Rivers' 21st Century Group, contends blacks have long been shy in
airing their troubles from within. "People don't want to talk about when black is ugly," Thorne
says. "They only want to hear about 'black is beautiful.' "
Bond, who has been praised for chairing the NAACP board following a period of turmoil within
the organization, says there is only so much the NAACP can do when it comes to AIDS and the
issue of promiscuity.
"Is our role to speak of abstinence?" asks Bond. "We're not a birth control organization.
That's not our mission."
Rivers, a minister in the Church of God In Christ, is being courted by the presidential
campaigns of both George W. Bush, the Texas governor, and Vice President Al Gore. He plans to
circumvent traditional black leaders and appeal to the major political parties, as well as the
Roman Catholic Church, to help him and his organization address the plight of AIDS sufferers in
Africa.
"You cannot advocate for black people in the United States without understanding the
interdependence of black problems throughout the world," Rivers says. "We're going to be moving
beyond the bifurcation between domestic and foreign."
For decades, black Americans have had a spiritual connection to Africa. During the 1960s,
stories of Africa's struggles for independence from the French and British were chronicled
endlessly in the black press. Blacks were proud when their representatives in Congress -
principally Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs in those halcyon days of African freedom
battles - presented themselves at African independence ceremonies. Diggs was known to drop
tears on such occasions.
The 1970s saw an even more impassioned identification with Africa following the dramatization
of Alex Haley's "Roots" from book to television screen, a telling of an African's journey from
his homeland to slavery in America. The 1980s were a rallying cry to cripple apartheid in South
Africa. But it didn't take long, following the 1990 freeing of Nelson Mandela and his 1994
ascent to the presidency, for some American blacks to dream of putting a foothold on the
continent.
"Black Americans felt that economic opportunities were limited to them in America, Asia, and
Europe," says Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a former senior foreign policy researcher for the
Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, who now heads Ncediwe/Brits, a Washington D.C.-based
group that works with Africans grappling with the AIDS crisis. "So they focused their attention
on a continent that might be more open to them and provide more economic opportunities."
Meanwhile, underlying the romance of going back to Africa, of making money there, a monumental
health crisis was looming: AIDS. But black business interests still continued to push the
Clinton administration for a trade bill with Africa.
"I would argue that that is extremely shortsighted and detrimental," Coleman-Adebayo says. "Is
that the most important thing you can do in Africa - support a trade bill - when we have
millions dying of AIDS?"
Coleman-Adebayo sees further catastrophe looming. "We're looking at the depopulation of Africa
as we know it," she says. "It's going to become a continent of orphans, the elderly, war
victims, and the sick. I believe we should look at AIDS in Africa as a war. And we need a war
chest. We need at least $1 billion."
The Clinton administration recently announced a $100 million aid package to help Africa deal
with its AIDS crisis.
"That's an important step - but a small step," says Dellums, who plans to encourage other
foreign governments to contribute. "Africa is our heritage, America is our citizenship. As part
of our citizenship, it is our duty to challenge this country to realize that millions are dying
in Africa."
US Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, has presented what she is calling a
"Marshall Plan" to Congress to help deal with the African AIDS epidemic. The bill, which would
establish an independent agency to help fund research and programs to combat the crisis, is
languishing in the House. Lee has corralled nearly four dozen sponsors, but realizes there is
no hope the bill will be passed this session. "But the support is building," Lee says. "Next
year we'll have a jump start."
Lee doesn't think Rivers' criticism of other black leaders will help. "We've got to unify," she
says. "This is a whole new state of emergency. You can't get cynical and you can't bash
organizations that are doing a good job."
One challenge, black officials acknowledge, will be how to focus on the AIDS crisis in Africa
when black Americans have a major AIDS problem themselves. Blacks contract 45 percent of new
AIDS cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In the
mid-1980s, that number was only 25 percent.
"Many blacks who have not done anything in the black community are now going to help the
Africans," says Pernessa Seele, founder of Balm In Gilead, a New York-based group working to
develop AIDS awareness in black churches. "I am saddened by some of the very movers and shakers
who have jumped on AIDS in Africa and not done anything about AIDS in our own communities."
Dellums agrees. "This AIDS issue is not an 'over there' issue alone," he says. "It's also right
here in the 'hood."
Seele's is one voice not shying from the issue of promiscuity. She wants blacks to talk more
openly about sexual practices in their own communities. The issue of promiscuity, she says, is
not endemic to Africans only. "We have some of the same practices here and we don't talk about
them. We don't talk about the brothers who sleep with four and five women."
Seele says that the traditional role of missionaries alighting from American churches for the
shores of Africa now must change. "As our black churches continue to do their missionary work
in Africa, they have to do something other than just spread the word of God," she says. "They
must begin to address the issue of AIDS."
Rivers believes that black Americans can position themselves to save a continent that continues
to grip them emotionally and spiritually.
"Africa may yet be delivered by those to whom Africa sold into slavery," he says. "That's the
great irony."
Last of four parts
BYLINE: By Kurt Shillinger, Globe Correspondent
BODY:
JOHANNESBURG - The prospect of a straight-talking minister from Dorchester prodding African
leaders with a new gospel that casual sex is tantamount to violence meets skepticism from Cape
Town to Kampala.
It is the aim of the Rev. Eugene Rivers to stir the waters rather than still them. Angered by
the ravaging of Africa by AIDS, he is launching a campaign to shame African governments for
doing and spending too little, and prominent black Americans for watching in silence as
millions of Africans die each year.
"It is time to embarrass the ambassadorial representation of African countries in Washington,"
Rivers says. "If they could mobilize around the issue of apartheid, why don't they do the same
for AIDS?"
The blitzkrieg approach might work on American politicians in Washington, where confrontation
is the norm in politics and the Clinton administration sympathizes with issues such as the need
to ease Africa's debt burden and break the corporate grip on anti-AIDS drugs.
But Africans may be harder to influence. As leaders like South African President Thabo Mbeki
promote their vision of an African renaissance, they are increasingly impatient playing the
junior partner in North-South relations. They reject implicit assumptions that the West has all
the answers for Africa.
Against this backdrop, Rivers raises thorny issues. He argues that the AIDS epidemic is a
symptom of a cultural collapse in Africa, and wants to make abstinence a human rights issue.
But Africans are traditionally reticent talking about sex. Most find it difficult to discuss
the subject even with their own partners, studies have shown, let alone outsiders. At a church
conference in Zimbabwe last December, when Rivers first floated the idea that in the age of
AIDS male promiscuity is a form of violence against women and children, his pleas for open
discussion were met with shocked silence.
"It is dangerous to bring in outsiders to talk about sexuality," says Patricio Rojas,
representative of the World Health Organization in Namibia. "The field is so complex. If you
talk about changing mores, mores in Boston are very different from mores in Namibia. We try to
promote a strong interchange of experiences within Africa. That is more useful. Closeness is
fundamental to the success of the message."
But John Caldwell, an expert on Africa at the Australian National university in Canberra, has
grown impatient with the light-handed approach. In his latest book on the AIDS epidemic, he
argues that "government silence is partly explained by the surprising fact that overseas donor
governments have not put sufficient pressure on political leaders to speak out and do so
continuously, and to organize against the disease.
"There have been no inducements, such as massive help to the health system and to programs to
curb AIDS given on condition of sustained and high-profile leadership."
If donor governments have the clout to attach conditions, however, smaller players probably
don't. Mark Ottenweller, an American doctor who runs 12 AIDS support groups in Soweto in a
partnership between local officials and the US organization Hope Worldwide,says that engaging
African leaders often is a matter of tact and tone.
"Frequently it's out of guilt that they get involved, as long as you're not too critical," he
says.
The same rule applies at the street level. Ottenweller, who still carries the Bayou accent of
his Louisiana upbringing, holds informal workshops on marriage in his free time. The way to
break through silence, he says, is to establish a sense of common experience.
A health official in the northern Namibian town of Rundu, where AIDS is taking a particularly
grim toll, agrees. "If you just walk in and start talking about sex, you will make people
resistant," the official says, requesting anonymity. "People must feel you're not an outsider.
You must use 'we' and not 'you,' and have an entry point into the community like a school or a
church."
Adds Bart Cox, director of the AIDS Committee at the Anglican Diocese in Johannesburg: "It is
the interdependence of people that matters. Stories of, 'Oh, you too?' " he says. "We have to
create bonds of compassion through human experience."
Still, as the epidemic swells, it is creating an increasing "compassion burden." More people
are falling sick and dying, more families are losing breadwinners, more children are left
parentless. Governments must be held more accountable, AIDS experts say, but it is also
critically important to get new players - notably churches - involved in building
community-based care networks.
"One of the main objectives over the next couple of years is to bring churches on board," says
Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, a joint program of several agencies in the United
Nations. "To be blunt, orphanages will mean tremendous business for churches."
The outsider question doesn't deter Rivers, who models his initiative after the Biblical story
of Joseph. Sold into slavery by his brothers, he later saved them from famine and ruin.
"Until Africans in Africa confront their complicity in the slave trade, they have no moral
standing to challenge blacks in the US who challenge them regarding the same indifference that
they now express toward the holocaust in Africa today," Rivers says.
| |
|
| "Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
> Which country in Africa has a lower population today, than it had
> 5 years, 10 years, let alone 20 years ago?
>
> None. Zero. There aren't any.
>
AVERT is an international AIDS charityavert.org - bringing you information on HIV & AIDSsite
guide help & advice contact us about AVERT home Africa
HIV and AIDS have already had a significant impact and caused a vast amount of human suffering
in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region of the world that is most heavily affected by the AIDS
pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of all HIV positive people live in this area, although it contains
little more than 10% of the world's population. 1 The impact of the epidemic in Sub-Saharan
Africa has been wide reaching and has not been confined to the health sector. Households,
education, workplaces and the economy have been affected among other sections of society
During 2005 alone, an estimated 2 million adults and children died as a result of AIDS in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the beginning of the epidemic more than 15 million Africans have died
from AIDS. 2
The Impact on the Health Sector
In all affected countries the AIDS epidemic is bringing additional pressure to bear on the
health sector. As the epidemic matures, the demand for care for those living with HIV rises, as
does the toll among health workers. In sub-Saharan Africa, the direct medical costs of AIDS
(excluding antiretroviral therapy) have been estimated at about US$30 per year for every person
infected, at a time when overall public health spending is less than US$10 per year for most
African countries. 3
The Effect on Hospitals
Doctors at the Rixile HIV clinic treat an ill HIV+ child, Tintswalo.
As the HIV prevalence of a country rises, the strain placed on its hospitals is likely to
increase. In Sub-Saharan Africa, people with HIV-related diseases occupy more than half of all
hospital beds. 4 Government-funded research in South Africa has suggested that, on average,
HIV-positive patients stay in hospital four times longer than other patients. It is predicted
that patients affected by HIV and AIDS will soon account for 60-70% of hospital expenditure in
South Africa. 5
Hospitals are struggling to cope, especially in poorer African countries where there are often
not enough beds available. This shortage results in people being admitted only in the later
stages of illness, reducing their chances of recovery. As the epidemic worsens, more complex
cases of HIV and AIDS are likely to arise, taking up more hospital time and further reducing
the standard of care provided.
Health Care Workers
While AIDS is causing an increased demand for health services, large numbers of healthcare
professionals are being affected by the epidemic. Botswana, for example, lost 17% of its
healthcare workforce due to AIDS between 1999 and 2005. A study in one region of Zambia found
that 40% of midwives were HIV-positive. 6 Healthcare workers are already scarce in most African
countries. Excessive workloads, poor pay and the temptation of migrating to richer countries
once trained are factors that have played a role in this shortage.
Although the recent increase in the provision of antiretroviral drugs (ARVS, which
significantly delay the progression from HIV to AIDS) has brought hope to many in Africa, it
has also put increased strain on healthcare workers. Providing ARVs requires more time and
training than is currently available in most countries - for instance, in Tanzania it has been
estimated that providing treatment to all those who need it would require the full-time
services of almost half the existing health workforce. 7
The Impact on Households
The toll of HIV and AIDS on households can be very severe. Although no part of the population
is unaffected by HIV, it is often the poorest sectors of society that are most vulnerable to
the epidemic and for whom the consequences are most severe. In many cases, the presence of AIDS
means that the household will dissolve, as parents die and children are sent to relatives for
care and upbringing. A study of rural South Africa suggested that households where an adult had
died from AIDS were four times more likely to dissolve than those where no deaths had occurred.
8 Much happens before this dissolution takes place; AIDS strips families of their assets and
income-earners, further impoverishing the poor.
Household Income
An HIV+ woman in Joza.
In Botswana it is estimated that, on average, every income earner is likely to acquire one
additional dependent over the next ten years due to the AIDS epidemic. A dramatic increase in
destitute households - those with no income earners - is also expected. 9 Other countries in
the region are experiencing the same problem, as individuals who would otherwise provide a
household with income are prevented from working by HIV and AIDS - either because they are ill
themselves or because they are caring for another family member who is. Such a situation is
likely to have repercussions for every member of the family. Children may be forced to abandon
their education and in some cases women may be forced to turn to sex work. This can lead to a
higher risk of HIV transmission, which further exacerbates the situation.
Another study in three countries, Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Uganda, has calculated that AIDS
will not only reverse progress in poverty reduction, but will increase the percentage of people
living in extreme poverty (from 45% in 2000 to 51% in 2015). 10
Basic Necessities
A study in South Africa found that already poor households coping with members who are sick
from HIV or AIDS were reducing spending on necessities even further. The most likely expenses
to be cut were clothing (21%), electricity (16%) and other services (9%). Falling incomes
forced about 6% of households to reduce the amount they spent on food and almost half of
households reported having insufficient food at times. 11
"She then led me to the kitchen and showed me empty buckets of food and said they had nothing
to eat that day just like other days."12Food Production
The AIDS epidemic adds to food insecurity in many areas, as agricultural work is neglected or
abandoned due to household illness. In Malawi, where food shortages have had a devastating
effect, it has been recognised that HIV and AIDS are fuelling the country's poor agricultural
output. 13 It is thought that by 2020, Malawi's agricultural workforce will be 14% smaller than
it would have been without HIV and AIDS. In other countries, such as Mozambique, Botswana,
Namibia and Zimbabwe, the reduction is likely to be over 20%. 14
A recent study in Kenya demonstrated that food production in households where the head of the
family died of AIDS were affected in different ways depending on the sex of the deceased. As in
other Sub-Saharan African countries, it was generally found that the death of a male reduced
the production of 'cash crops' (such as coffee, tea and sugar), while the death of a female
reduced the production of grain and other crops necessary for household survival. 15
Healthcare expenses and funeral costs
Taking care of a person sick with AIDS is not only an emotional strain for household members,
but also a major strain on household resources. Loss of income, additional care-related
expenses, the reduced ability of caregivers to work, and mounting medical fees push affected
households deeper into poverty. It is estimated that, on average, HIV-related care can absorb
one-third of a household's monthly income. 16
The financial burden of death can also be considerable, with some families in South Africa
spending three times their total household monthly income on a funeral. 17
How do HIV/AIDS affected households cope in Africa?
Three main coping strategies appear to be adopted among affected households. Savings are used
up or assets sold; assistance is received from other households; and the composition of
households tends to change, with fewer adults of prime working age in the households.
Almost invariably, the burden of coping rests with women. Upon a family member becoming ill,
the role of women as carers, income-earners and housekeepers is stepped up. They are often
forced to step into roles outside their homes as well. In parts of Zimbabwe, for example, women
are moving into the traditionally male-dominated carpentry industry. This often results in
women having less time to prepare food and for other tasks at home.
"I used to stay with the children, but now it is a problem. I have to work in the fields. Last
year I had more money to hire labour so the crops got weeded more often. This year I had to do
it myself."-Angelina, Zimbabwe- 18
Tapping into savings if available and taking on more debt is usually the first option chosen by
households that struggle to pay for medical treatment or funeral costs. Then as debts mount,
precious assets such as bicycles, livestock and even land, are sold. Once households are
stripped of their productive assets, the chances of them recovering and rebuilding their
livelihoods become even slimmer.
The number of working adults in a family will often decrease.
"Our fields are idle because there is nobody to work them. We don't have machinery for farming,
we only have manpower - if we are sick, or spend our time looking after family members who are
sick, we have no time to spend working in the fields."-Toby Solomon, commissioner for the
Nsanje district, Malawi- 19
One of the more unfortunate responses to a death in poorer households is removing the children
(especially girls) from school. Often the school uniforms and fees become unaffordable for the
families and the child's labour and income-generating potential are required in the household.
"Because I'm a poor African woman, I can't raise enough money for three orphans. The one in
secondary school, sometimes she misses first term because I'm looking for tuition. The others
miss schools for two or three days at a time. I had a cow I used to milk, but as time went on
the cow died, so I can't find any other income."-Barbara, Uganda- 20
The Impact on Children
It is hard to overemphasise the trauma and hardship that children affected by HIV and AIDS are
forced to bear worldwide. The epidemic not only causes children to lose their parents or
guardians, but sometimes their childhood as well.
As parents and family members become ill, children take on more responsibility to earn an
income, produce food and care for family members. It is harder for these children to access
adequate nutrition, basic health care, housing and clothing. Fewer families have the money to
send their children to school.
Often both of the parents are HIV-positive in Africa. Consequently, more children have been
orphaned by AIDS in Africa than anywhere else. Many children are now raised by their
grandparents or left on their own in child-headed households.
As projections of the number of AIDS orphans rise, some have called for an increase in
institutional care for children. However this solution is not only expensive but also
detrimental to the children. Institutionalisation stores up problems for society, which is ill
equipped to cope with an influx of young adults who have not been socialised in the community
in which they have to live. There are other alternatives available. One example is the approach
developed by church groups in Zimbabwe, where they recruit community members to visit orphans
in their homes, where they live either with foster parents, grandparents or other relatives, or
in child-headed households.
The way forward is prevention. Firstly, it is crucial to prevent children from becoming
infected with HIV at birth as well as later in life. Secondly, if efforts are made to prevent
adults becoming infected with HIV, and to care for those already infected, then fewer children
will be orphaned by AIDS in the future.
To learn more, see our Children, HIV & AIDS page.
The Impact on the education Sector
The relationship between AIDS and the education sector is circular - as the epidemic worsens,
the education sector is damaged, which in turn is likely to increase the incidence of HIV
transmission. There are numerous ways in which AIDS can affect education, but equally there are
many ways in which education can help the fight against AIDS. The extent to which schools and
other education institutions are able to continue functioning will influence how well societies
eventually recover from the epidemic.
"Without education, AIDS will continue its rampant spread. With AIDS out of control, education
will be out of reach"-Peter Piot, Director of UNAIDS- 21
Fewer Children Receiving a Basic Education
The classroom in Illinge, South Africa.
A decline in school enrolment is one of the most visible effects of the epidemic. This will in
itself have an effect on HIV prevention, as a good basic | | |