AIDS as a Security Threat
Quote:
But what was once seen as a humanitarian catastrophe is viewed increasingly as a security threat—an important reason behind the $15 billion Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that President Bush announced in January 2003. A study of 112 countries by Susan Peterson, a political scientist at the College of William and Mary, and Stephen Shellman, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, found that countries with severe AIDS epidemics had correspondingly high levels of human-rights abuse and civil conflict. “Does AIDS make war or civil strife more likely?” asks Peterson. “The answer is yes.”
Even in countries that don’t collapse, AIDS deaths can threaten security in the form of AIDS orphans, who are desperate, disenfranchised, vulnerable to radicalization, and projected to reach 25 million worldwide by 2010. “Where do you think the breeding ground for terrorism will be?” asks General Charles Wald, the former operational head of European Command, which also oversees U.S. military operations in most of Africa. At a recent conference, Wald listed the biggest threats to U.S. security. After terrorism and weapons of mass destruction came AIDS.
High on the list of the Pentagon’s concerns about AIDS is its impact on African militaries; for many, it has become the biggest killer. Young, often far from home, and with cash in their pockets, soldiers who must live under fire cultivate a sense of invulnerability that can kill them when they come back to the barracks. The epidemic accounts for seven out of ten military deaths in South Africa and kills more Ugandan soldiers than any other cause, including a brutal twenty-year insurgency and two wars in Congo. AIDS deaths have reduced Malawi’s forces by 40 percent. Mozambique can’t train police officers fast enough to replace those dying of the disease. “As we fight the enemy, the HIV is also fighting us,” John Amosa, a forty-five-year-old AIDS-afflicted Ugandan sergeant, told me. “We have two front lines.”
More at Containment Strategy
good piece on why AIDs is not simply a health or social problem
best
Tom
Good documentary on cable
There is a pretty good documentary on Showtime on AIDS in Africa looking at the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects of AIDS on the continent. It is not a pleasant view and it will get much worse. The number of AIDS orphans already runs in the millions as a sub-component of the 30 million infected.
I recommend it to this audience.
Best
Tom
Estonia on the top in Europe for HIV infection
Quote:
Estonia continues to register one of the highest HIV infection rates in Europe. The Estonian Health Protection Inspectorate said 109 new cases of HIV infection have been registered already this year. Tragically, among them are two girls aged under four years old. The majority of cases, 38, were registered in Narva, while 35 came from Tallinn and 23 from East Viru county. Most people who were found to have the virus were aged between 20 and 24. In total, Estonia is now home to 5,840 HIV carriers and 139 AIDS patients.
The numbers seem small, but then there's only 1.5 million living here and less than 8,000 in the military!
Africa, AIDS, and Social Mores
Good column this AM from the LA Times by way of the SWJ Editorial round up.
It brings up the social mores issue as part of the puzzle.
Quote:
Africa's AIDS puzzle
The key to combating a disease still killing millions is to take a human approach.
By Jonny Steinberg March 5, 2008
Even though it is hardly fashionable today to regard plagues as God-sent, the African AIDS pandemic is a catastrophe of such massive proportions that we have to struggle not to think about it in a religious way. More than 2 million people are perishing each year; millions more will die if they do not receive treatment. Out of this colossal theft of human beings, we have a great need to tell a story about this epidemic that ends with redemption.
In our secular age, though, the agent of the redemption we conjure is not a god but Science with a capital S. In this case, Science's lodestar is antiretroviral treatment, or ART, which, if made accessible across the continent, has the potential to save millions of lives.
Great redemptive hope has been invested in ART. The distinguished African historian John Iliffe, for instance, has suggested that the drugs will inspire Africans to challenge the dire leadership that has afflicted the continent since independence in the 1960s, thus heralding an era of renewal in African public life. We watch with keen interest as social movements rally around treatment, in the hope that they will elevate African countries to new heights.
The Pope, the Church, and AIDS in Africa
I cannot understand how the Pope and the Church continue to hold to dogma when it is destructive. The arrogance in this is stunning, a 21st Century religious equivalent of "let them eat cake."
Tom
Quote:
Pope visits Africa, reaffirms ban on condoms
CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI refused Wednesday to soften the Vatican's ban on condom use as he arrived in Africa for his first visit to the continent as pope.
He landed in Cameroon, the first stop on a trip that will also take him to Angola.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been hit harder by AIDS and HIV than any other region of the world, according to the United Nations and World Health Organization. There has been fierce debate between those who advocate the use of condoms to help stop the spread of the epidemic and those who oppose it.
The pontiff reiterated the Vatican's policy on condom use as he flew from Rome to Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, CNN Vatican analyst John Allen said.
Religious dogma & theology
And how many angels can stand on the point of a pin?
Of course birth control, be it condums, the pill is a sound and necessary practice, and yes, of course it reduces the spreading of AIDS which happens today we all know between men and women, not just men and men.
We all know in our own families and among our friends good folks who happen to be Catholic who limit and control by use of the condum or the birth control pill the number of children they believe they can afford to raise and educate in today's complex world.
No, I do not support widespread abortion, but I do believe it is up to the woman involved to decide if they can afford mentally, physically, and fiscally to have a child or not. No, I do not support partial birth abortion, but I do support use of the morning after pill for women to be sure that they don't get pregnant when their life plan at that time does not yet include having children, yet.
Yes, President Obama, who I did not vote for, is moving to knock down constraints on stem cell research where fertilization to create life has not occurred. No, I don't support use of fertilized eggs for the sole and specific purpose of doing medical research.
Yes, as one who suffers from diabetes, arthritis, cancer, and other annoying diseases I do support the vast range of possibilities being researched by use of stem cells in medical research. Too, I have family members who suffer from Crohn's Disease and it is possible that stem cell research can help them, too, and I am all for that.
In the Dark Ages "religion" [and I am a conservative Christian Protestant] was used both to help and to control and manage for hierarchial benefit the superstructure of the old Catholic Church. Competititon in religion, as in any other "business" is good and religious competition has helped bring an end to some absurd and false Protestant & Roman dogma while it has also helped enlighten and improve the use of more in common dogma which is sound and Biblically based and justifiable.
Many of us Protesants and Catholics prefer to live religious values by our personal witness and allow others their witness be it the same or different. We are all still Christians. Grace is the operative term in being a Christian, not "law" as was the process in the Old Testament.
The same cannot be said for Islam where the extremists will kill those who they "judge" to be wrong in their belief, understanding, and practice of Islam. Yes, I know, you can point to ancient Christian wars, but I am talking about today, 2009, and don't give a tinkers damn about a handful of idiots in Northern Ireland trying to resurrect the worst days of the old now defunct IRA. That was and is peanuts comparedn to today's religious terrorists and the killings and maiming they continue to inflict.
This discussion can go on and on, endlessly.
What works for one Christian may not always work for another, so we have freedom of religion, and the important feature of our culture, separate of church and state, which I heartily support. I oppose on religious grounds same sex marriages and in the military I oppose homosexuality as a security, health, and in the interests of good discipline threat. I am a qualfied as in limited proponent of abortion "to save the life of the mother" but in general I would like to see abotion avoided where and when possible. But still in the final analysis my belief it that the choice of abortion or not should be left up in the final analysis to the woman involved, not to any cleric or special interest group trying to impose their dogma on all others.
So AIDS is a real threat to the military, abortion while not a wholesale answer to life's problems has a place that I find best determined by the woman involved, but allowing my reservation in that I do oppose 100% partial birth abortions.
Finally, regarding celebacy and ancient church history. One of our family lines is Gillis, and descends from an early 1400s Irish Catholic priest sent from Ireland to the highlands of Scotland, where he married and had 12 children. Priests in ancient history in outlying parishes and nations often married and had families, there was and is nothing wrong with that. Celebacy is a dogma, it is not a scriptual edict. Early Popes were married. Economic considerations to keep the early church going were claimed as an excuse to start the practice of celebacy, together with misinterpretations and/or misunderstandings of the fact that St. Paul seemingly had a miserable marriage and thus advocated celebacy as his reaction to his own miserable marriage.
End of "pontifications" from a separation of church and state advocate who neverthleless is anti-homosexual as such practice is anti-Scriptual but who finds God's williness to grant his grace in circumstances where birth control (condums, the pill, etc.) are a good measure of manage one's own family finances.
