AIDS as a Security Threat

[Tom Odom]

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

[Tom Odom]

A friend sent me a short note on the subject of AIDS in the Repulblic of South Africa's military. According to a knowledgeable person, the widespread of the disease has made it impossible to to assemble a force of 1600 men who are AIDS free.

There is no way to evaluate the tip but consider the effects on operations, ability to project power, and just sustaining a force under these circumstances.

Best

Tom

[Stan]

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!

[goesh]

From the Washington Post:


Uganda's early gains against HIV eroding
Message of fear, fidelity diluted by array of other remedies

By Craig Timberg

Updated: 1:56 a.m. ET March 29, 2007
New generation, new attitude
Even in Uganda, these key ingredients have been lost as a new generation coming of age years after Lutaaya's death indulges in the same reckless behavior that first spread the disease so widely.

"We saw him. We saw him die. We abandoned the girlfriends," said Swizen Kyomuhendo, a social scientist at Makerere, who was an undergraduate when Lutaaya spoke there. "When you look at the university students now, they are not as terrified as we were then."

The percentage of sexually active men with multiple partners has more than doubled in recent years, undoing earlier declines, surveys show. Reports of sexually transmitted diseases among women, another indicator of dangerous behavior, have risen sharply as well.

[120mm]

I recently "defunded" one of the non-profit groups I've contributed to for years. They are currently engaged in supplying and administering AIDS suppression drugs in continental Africa, which I think is a destructive practice. I will, like Babe Ruth "calling his shot", say right now, that suppressing AIDS symptoms and development without changing sexual mores will produce a worse, more virulent AIDS epidemic.

I suspect giving AIDS drugs to a prostitute or to a man who frequents prostitutes so they can live longer and spread more HIV cannot be justified no matter what set of morals and ethics you can name.

[Tom Odom]

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.

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.

[Tom Odom]

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

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.