Why didn't I know it was World AIDS Day until I got home today and watched Oprah? World AIDS Day - December 1st I think that's one of the problems - no one in the US really realizes the scale upon which this disaster is taking place in Africa or any developing country.
Ok, this is kind of stupid to admit, but I only knew about this because of Oprah. I can't believe that in a 1 hour show that I learned so much. Maybe by putting some of it here, someone else will learn something too. It's a tragedy of a size so immense that I can't get my mind around it. According to CNN -
Among the other statistics:
5.4 million new AIDS infections in 1999, 4 million of them in Africa.
2.8 million dead of AIDS in 1999, 85 percent of them in Africa.
13.2 million children orphaned by AIDS, 12.1 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Reduced life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa from 59 years to 45 between 2005 and 2010, and in Zimbabwe from 61 to 33.
More than 500,000 babies infected in 1999 by their mothers -- most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Finally, this: The bubonic plague is reckoned to have killed about 30 million people in medieval Europe. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that AIDS deaths and the loss of future population from the deaths of women of child-bearing age means that by 2010, sub-Saharan Africa will have 71 million fewer people than it would otherwise.
This is such a waste. The hardest hit in this epidemic are women and children. Women are the ones dying of the disease, especially in poor countries, and their children are growing up orphaned. What's going to happen to those children?
As much as humanitarianism, it is this vision of lawlessness and chaos and their potential to destabilize the global economy that has fueled worldwide concern."
There's more information available than I can digest easily. But the things that stick in my mind are that A) this is a preventable disease, B) people are dying of it or spreading it because the drugs are not available because no one is willing to pay for the drugs to get to where they need to go and to get distributed, C) that women are the hardest hit by this, D) that these are all people - normal people who got stuck with this lot in life simply because of where they were born, or because they were born women instead of men.
This stuff is rather old, but I guess if I wanted to join this fight, I'd want to try to get the drugs to people more cheaply and quickly. Many of the articles I found point to how the US drug companies are lobbying and fighting to keep African countries from making generic (or minimally cheaper) drugs available to their populations.
Posted by cshell at December 1, 2003 08:46 PM