Politicians must suspend moral judgments if AIDS is to be defeated

[pn: marinah m and yappy would love this article. '-)]

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4223619
AIDS

Too much morality, too little sense

Jul 28th 2005
>From The Economist print edition


Politicians must suspend moral judgments if AIDS is to be defeated


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THE world is not winning the war against AIDS. By the end of this year, 3m
poor people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are supposed to
be receiving the treatment they need. So far, though, barely 1m are. At
present, about 40m people are living with HIV, some 5m are infected with it
each year and over 3m die from it. The human and economic cost is huge.
India may well have more infected people than any other country. China's
epidemic has the potential to dwarf all others (see article).

In most of the world, AIDS tends to affect fairly discrete groups, usually
prostitutes, homosexuals and drug addicts. In most societies these people
are frowned upon. Democracies like them no more than autocracies. When it
comes to receiving help from taxpayers, they are never at the top of
anyone's list, especially in countries so poor that basic health care is
not available to most citizens.

But if AIDS is not contained among the groups that harbour it, it spreads
into the general population, as it has in Africa. There, it affects every
section of the population?slum-dweller and sophisticate, peasant and
professional. Everyone who engages in that near universal activity, sex, is
at risk. As it is, AIDS is no respecter of morals: it affects babies as
they are born, children as they are orphaned, nurses as they are
accidentally pricked by a dirty needle, patients of any kind as they
receive a transfusion of contaminated blood. Indeed, it affects the entire
society in which its victims live and die.




The White House provides information about its HIV/AIDS policy and the
announcement about the president?s emergency plan for AIDS relief. See also
the G8.


It also affects the faithful wife of the unfaithful husband. That is why
the ABC slogan so beloved by the Bush administration?Abstinence, Be
faithful and Condoms?is, in practice, a slap in the face to many people.
The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief commits at least a third of
its promised $15 billion to ?abstinence until marriage? as the main way of
stopping the spread of AIDS. It also urges that the use of condoms be
confined to people who engage in ?risky behaviour??prostitutes or couples
with one member who is HIV-positive. Many groups are reported to be ending
or reducing their condom-promotion schemes to qualify for American money.

That might not matter if condoms did not matter, but they do. In the
absence of a proper vaccine, an absence that is likely to continue for
years, condoms are the best prophylactic available to anyone at risk of HIV
infection through a sexual encounter, within or outside marriage (see
article). Abstinence might, it is true, be better still, but abstinence
will not, in the real world, be practised widely enough to bring AIDS under
control. Now, in a further demonstration of its moral zeal, the Bush
administration is insisting that all groups, American or foreign, that are
engaged in the struggle against AIDS must declare their opposition to
prostitution if they are to receive American money. The administration is
also against all needle-exchange projects for drug addicts, one of the
groups most likely to contract, and spread, AIDS in Russia, India and
China.

The poor countries that have got on top of nascent AIDS epidemics?Brazil
(see article), Thailand, Uganda and Cambodia?have done it by changing
behaviour. That is no easy task, involving as it does a variety of actions
across a wide front. It has proved possible because limits have been set on
the endeavour: people have not been asked to act morally, merely in their
own self-interest, which happens to be in the interest of society.

The lesson for rich and poor alike is that to contain AIDS morality must
take second place. Politicians may find it easier to yield to sanctimonious
lobbyists than to explain why refraining from judging other people makes
more sense. But that does not excuse them. Too many lives are at stake.


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