AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

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AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby GrahamB on Fri Dec 11, 2009 9:17 am

Reading this chapter, which can finally be published, now the law-suit has been dropped, has made me sad and depressed with the basic fuck-witness of human nature.

100 British soldiers die in Afghanistan this year and it's front page news for weeks. If you live in the 'West' I think it's impossible to imagine the amount of suffering going on in other countries.

I thought I'd share.

http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matth ... s-chapter/
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby GrahamB on Fri Dec 11, 2009 9:19 am

Excellent quote:

"This is a continent that has been brutally exploited by the developed world, first by empire, and then by globalised capital. Conspiracy theories about AIDS and Western medicine are not entirely absurd in this context. The pharmaceutical industry has indeed been caught performing drug trials in Africa which would be impossible anywhere in the developed world. Many find it suspicious that black Africans seem to be the biggest victims of AIDS, and point to the biological warfare programmes set up by the apartheid governments; there have also been suspicions that the scientific discourse of HIV/AIDS might be a device, a Trojan horse for spreading even more exploitative Western political and economic agendas around a problem that is simply one of poverty.

And these are new countries, for which independence and self-rule are recent developments, which are struggling to find their commercial feet and true cultural identity after centuries of colonisation. Traditional medicine represents an important link with an autonomous past; besides which, anti-retroviral medications have been unnecessarily – offensively, absurdly – expensive, and until moves to challenge this became partially successful, many Africans were effectively denied access to medical treatment as a result.
It’s very easy for us to feel smug, and to forget that we all have our own strange cultural idiosyncrasies which prevent us from taking up sensible public-health programmes. For examples, we don’t even have to look as far as MMR. There is a good evidence base, for example, to show that needle-exchange programmes reduce the spread of HIV, but this strategy has been rejected time and again in favour of “Just say no.” Development charities funded by US Christian groups refuse to engage with birth control, and any suggestion of abortion, even in countries where being in control of your own fertility could mean the difference between success and failure in life, is met with a cold, pious stare. These impractical moral principles are so deeply entrenched that Pepfar, the US Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has insisted that every recipient of international aid money must sign a declaration expressly promising not to have any involvement with sex workers.

We mustn’t appear insensitive to the Christian value system, but it seems to me that engaging sex workers is almost the cornerstone of any effective AIDS policy: commercial sex is frequently the “vector of transmission”, and sex workers a very high-risk population; but there are also more subtle issues at stake. If you secure the legal rights of prostitutes to be free from violence and discrimination, you empower them to demand universal condom use, and that way you can prevent HIV from being spread into the whole community. This is where science meets culture. But perhaps even to your own friends and neighbours, in whatever suburban idyll has become your home, the moral principle of abstinence from sex and drugs is more important than people dying of AIDS; and perhaps, then, they are no less irrational than Thabo Mbeki."
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby Bill on Mon Dec 14, 2009 5:38 pm

Their own behavior is killing them. But Africans always find a way to blame others for their problems.
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby Darth Rock&Roll on Mon Dec 14, 2009 5:46 pm

Bill wrote:Their own behavior is killing them. But Africans always find a way to blame others for their problems.


I agree on point one and I would say that on your second point, everyone does this.
Whenever there is a problem on a micro or macro scale, it is ALWAYS someone else's fault.

this is the true human folly here. in my opinion. :)
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby canard on Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:29 am

Bringing us swiftly back on topic......
This is very disturbing
and now, at last, we come to the lowest point of this whole story, not merely for Matthias Rath’s movement, but for the alternative therapy movement around the world as a whole. In 2007, with a huge public flourish, to great media coverage, Rath’s former employee Anthony Brink filed a formal complaint against Zackie Achmat, the head of the TAC. Bizarrely, he filed this complaint with the International Criminal
Court at The Hague, accusing Achmat of genocide for successfully campaigning to get access to HIV drugs for the people of South Africa
.


wtf??!!?

it was also in wired....
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/06/start/the-man-who-sold-out-medicine.aspx

good article - thanks Graham.
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby yeniseri on Tue Dec 15, 2009 11:46 am

The report said
Many find it suspicious that black Africans seem to be the biggest victims of AIDS, and point to the biological warfare programmes set up by the apartheid governments; there have also been suspicions that the scientific discourse of HIV/AIDS might be a device, a Trojan horse for spreading even more exploitative Western political and economic agendas around a problem that is simply one of poverty.
but it is not fair to blame white Europeans for the ignorance of present day Africa. The colonial presence is there, nonetheless but it is lack of a health care system, the persistance of tribal beliefs ad the practice of labelling everything AIDS in order to attempt to secure monetary gain, only to be used by corrupt governments.
A recent report shows that 25-30% of S. African military recruits have AIDS (complex) but their government does nothing in the matter of education and sanitary proactive mthods to combat that ignorance.
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby Steve James on Tue Dec 15, 2009 3:20 pm

I don't think the criticism is of "white" Europeans. In general, it's talking about a conspiracy against "black" Africans because they are the primary victims of the disease in South Africa. They are the majority of victims in Nigeria, too. However, the populations are completely different. As for "ignorance," no one was more ignorant or acted more ignorantly toward HIV/AIDs than those in the developed countries, including and especially the US. That's when no one was really concerned about AIDs in Africa much at all. Calling AIDS a punishment from God didn't start in Africa.

But, let's be clear, it's stupid to talk about 'Africa', a continent larger than the US, China and SA combined. And, the whole "Africans are ignorant" idea was at the bedrock of European colonialism and exploitation. No, I'm not trying to excuse the ignorance of many in Africa (South Africa, specifically), but I'm sure many here might not know that South Africa is quite fundamentalist. So, there's a built in reluctance to talk about birth control (especially for whites), and condoms, etc. There's also a lot of prostitution because of the trucking industry. Anyway, it's a complicated problem, that is partly due to culture. But, that's not just African culture. Men in S. Africa (black and white) prefer to have "unsafe" sex, and women don't always have the ability to choose. In the U.S. and Europe, the men are the same --though women (and gblt) have much more "social capital" and can have their concerns treated or at least aired. If it's only ignorance, then that ignorance is widespread.

My last point is that I constantly hear (here) that planned parenthood is another form of eugenics. Well, I don't believe that Eugenics = Genocide. But, it wouldn't be hard to believe or historically inaccurate that attempts at genocide would still be possible, or that trials on chemicals, bio-weapons and other things wouldn't be tried on 'black' Africans. Personally, I am skeptical because I don't think that these things are easily controlled. There are those who seriously believe that these 'epidemics' are deliberately started.
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby Bill on Tue Dec 15, 2009 4:27 pm

Edward C. Green, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Has written on AIDS in Africa. He wrote this in March '09.

In theory, condom promotions ought to work everywhere. And intuitively, some condom use ought to be better than no use. But that's not what the research in Africa shows.

Why not?

One reason is "risk compensation." That is, when people think they're made safe by using condoms at least some of the time, they actually engage in riskier sex.

Another factor is that people seldom use condoms in steady relationships because doing so would imply a lack of trust. (And if condom use rates go up, it's possible we are seeing an increase of casual or commercial sex.) However, it's those ongoing relationships that drive Africa's worst epidemics. In these, most HIV infections are found in general populations, not in high-risk groups such as sex workers, gay men or persons who inject drugs. And in significant proportions of African populations, people have two or more regular sex partners who overlap in time. In Botswana, which has one of the world's highest HIV rates, 43 percent of men and 17 percent of women surveyed had two or more regular sex partners in the previous year.

These ongoing multiple concurrent sex partnerships resemble a giant, invisible web of relationships through which HIV/AIDS spreads. A study in Malawi showed that even though the average number of sexual partners was only slightly over two, fully two-thirds of this population was interconnected through such networks of overlapping, ongoing relationships.

So what has worked in Africa? Strategies that break up these multiple and concurrent sexual networks -- or, in plain language, faithful mutual monogamy or at least reduction in numbers of partners, especially concurrent ones. "Closed" or faithful polygamy can work as well.

In Uganda's early, largely home-grown AIDS program, which began in 1986, the focus was on "Sticking to One Partner" or "Zero Grazing" (which meant remaining faithful within a polygamous marriage) and "Loving Faithfully." These simple messages worked. More recently, the two countries with the highest HIV infection rates, Swaziland and Botswana, have both launched campaigns that discourage people from having multiple and concurrent sexual partners.

Don't misunderstand me; I am not anti-condom. All people should have full access to condoms, and condoms should always be a backup strategy for those who will not or cannot remain in a mutually faithful relationship. This was a key point in a 2004 "consensus statement" published and endorsed by some 150 global AIDS experts, including representatives the United Nations, World Health Organization and World Bank. These experts also affirmed that for sexually active adults, the first priority should be to promote mutual fidelity. Moreover, liberals and conservatives agree that condoms cannot address challenges that remain critical in Africa such as cross-generational sex, gender inequality and an end to domestic violence, rape and sexual coercion.

Surely it's time to start providing more evidence-based AIDS prevention in Africa.
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Re: AIDS in South Africa + Human stupidity

Postby Steve James on Tue Dec 15, 2009 5:23 pm

Well, I can agree with the cure: i.e., monogamous or closed relationships. However, that's like saying the way to cure the drug problem is for people not to use drugs. At best, even in closed monogamous relationships in the areas that are hardest hit, the increased use of condoms would (in my completely unscientific view) at least slow the transmission of all stds. It's also dangerous, imo, to say that condoms don't work. I mean, unless the idea is that African condoms are sub-standard, it doesn't seem like it would hurt. Let's face it, changing behavior is a solution to std transmission everywhere.
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