A smarter way to fight AIDS in Africa
SOURCE:* Washington Post*
AUTHORS: Craig Timberg, Daniel Halperin
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Fellow Colleague! I want to believe you are doing fine and better? How is
the week going already?
Optimism has never run higher that the AIDS epidemic can be defeated.
Effective medications have reached millions of people worldwide over the
past decade, and new research also suggests that even more investment in
distributing HIV drugs mighthelp slow the disease’s spread. Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke recently of an “AIDS-free
generation”
on
the horizon.
But for those living in the hardest-hit parts of Africa, there are risks in
the policy shifts underway in Washington and other Western capitals. The
rising enthusiasm for providing more medicines threatens to come at the
expense of promising initiatives for preventing HIV infections in the first
place — initiatives that could save many lives, with less money.
In Africa, the most important cause of the epidemic is sexual cultures in
which it’s not unusual for people to have more than one partner in the same
week or month. Sound strategies for stemming the spread of HIV would pay
particular attention to those places where Africans themselves — in nations
such as Uganda and Zimbabwe— have reversed the epidemic and saved millions
of lives by changing sexual behavior.
The growth of sex work is often cited as the key element of the epidemic.
But even more consequential was a shift away from traditional polygamy —
common across much of Africa but scorned by Christian missionaries — toward
more informal relationships. In these, men often had one wife but
maintained secretive and less permanent relationships with other women. And
with their husbands often spending months at a time working at far-off
mines, plantations or factories, wives increasingly took sex partners
outside of marriage.
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