AIDS in Africa
Mike at WorD posts information about AIDS, quoting Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.
In the early years of AIDS, the virus didn’t get attention because the victims were marginalized people: gays, Haitians and hemophiliacs.
Then when AIDS did threaten mainstream America, it finally evoked empathy and research dollars. But now it has slipped back in our consciousness because once more the primary victims are marginalized people – this time, Africans.
Nearly three million people die from AIDS each year. Among them are half a million children under the age of 15, mostly Africans infected during childbirth…
The life expectancy in Swaziland, which has the highest infection rate in the world, with nearly 40 percent of adults infected, has fallen from 55 to 34. This is a land where parents routinely bury their children, and where mothers constantly learn that they have given their babies a death sentence – the AIDS virus – during childbirth or breastfeeding…
Twenty-five years after we allowed AIDS to spin out of control because its victims were marginalized people, we’re doing the same thing all over again. And so today, as every day, another 7,900 people will die of AIDS.
pax et bonum
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