AIDS is a disease of all people – not just gays, Haitians or Africans. All over the world, there are signs of a renewed effort to contain and cure, to support AIDS sufferers and care for the loved ones they’ve left behind.
We’ve come a long way from Pat Buchanan’s assertion that AIDS is “nature’s revenge on homosexuals,” but have a ways to go. Most important, Americans are openly talking about HIV and AIDS. We’re educated and confident enough to regard its victims as no less human than anyone else.
Two federally funded studies reported in the New England Journal of Medicine urge all of us to know our HIV status. In a major shift in U.S. policy, it’s suggested we routinely test for HIV, just as we test for cholesterol and other conditions. According to the report, some 280,000 Americans are HIV-positive but don’t know it.
Testing all adults would be economically sound and workable. Physicians could remember to remind their patients to be tested.
Today, pediatric AIDS is almost unheard of in America. Maternal HIV testing, early treatment for mothers and infants and Caesarian section deliveries, are routine – a great turn-around from the grim state of treatment in the 1990s.
That which is now history in the U.S. prevails in Africa and elsewhere. Still, a shift is palpable there, since American and other international organizations have vowed a reinvigorated fight against HIV/AIDS.
As president, Bill Clinton seemed to do little for Africa and much less for HIV/AIDS. Now, the Clinton Foundation has reached agreements with countries and procurement consortiums to purchase AIDS therapies and equipment at a reduced price. The foundation’s pediatric and rural initiative focuses on bringing AIDS care and treatment to marginalized children and rural folks. It has also negotiated agreements to reduce prices for second-line AIDS drugs and rapid diagnostic tests.
Elsewhere, Iran’s government operates 75 clinics to fight AIDS, integrating prevention, care and social support. In many cities and in 45 prisons, the program supplies clean needles and condoms, encouraging safer sex in the land of the ayatollahs.
In Africa, the stigma of being HIV-positive is murderous, and testing for HIV is shunned. It led Kohei Yamada, a Japanese development worker in Malawi, to pen a song about HIV testing. In the song, a man and his girlfriend are tested for HIV. He tests positive, but his girlfriend doesn’t abandon him as he’d feared. In the song’s music video, Yamada’s featured as a samurai fighting HIV/AIDS. The world is using whatever it takes to save lives.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour’s prime-time broadcast on AIDS orphans in Nairobi was a breath of fresh air, providing evidence of the collapsing distance between the African AIDS sufferers, their orphans and the American public
Closer to home, the California legislature in August passed a law to support making condoms available to state prison inmates. We know that homosexual sex and incarceration go hand in hand. The prison HIV infection rate is eight times that of the general population. Surely, making condoms available to inmates should be part of the American prison landscape,
Prison testing for HIV is done in just 19 states. We must pay more attention to this population. Additionally, needle-exchange programs must become part of the anti-HIV arsenal.
In 25 years, millions have died from AIDS and many more will perish. Yet, the bright light of human understanding and conscience has begun to inch its way toward the dark corridors of our prisons, shooting galleries, unheralded places in Africa and elsewhere. We must celebrate that, and acknowledge many good people’s labor and vision.
Pius Kamau of Aurora is a thoracic and general surgeon. He was born and raised in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.
