About HIV/AIDS—a message from Dr. Anne-Marie
We live in a country that is experiencing an alarming increase in the incidence of HIV especially among young woman. We live on a planet where 40 million people are now infected with HIV. Thirty million of these are in Sub-sarahan Africa, 60 per cent of these are women. Eight million are between the ages of 15 and 24, and 70 per cent of those are women. The disease has a horrific and discriminating effect on women and children. In the words of Stephen Lewis, “It is denuding [Africa] of its female race.”
The greatest tragedy lies with the 15 million orphans and vulnerable children left in the wake of HIV/AIDS.
We possess the scientific knowledge, the pharmaceutical tools and the financial resources that are necessary to stop the devastating spread of this disease. Bill Gates has estimated that it would take $10 billion a year for the next decade to stop the spread of the HIV pandemic and reverse the devastation. The US spends $10 billion a month on a war in Iraq. Jeffery Sacs, UN economist and special advisor to Kofi Annan, has estimated that if rich countries shared a tiny fraction of their income—one penny of every $10 of GNP—they would save eight million lives annually in poverty and AIDS stricken nations.
And yet, five million people will be infected with HIV this year, most of them women, most of them widowed and most of them caring for their children in the most impoverished and desperate conditions known.
We have the tools. We are lacking the political will and leadership needed to implement them.
Our world has never had so many widow and orphans. Where are we in the fight to save them?
The statistics are horrifying. Eight sub-saharan countries are presently on the brink of human extinction. Before the fall of 2005, I had never heard these two words spoken together—Human Extinction.
In a recent survey of pregnant women between the ages of 25 to 29, the prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS was 56.3 per cent in Swaziland. The same stats are being uncovered in Lesotho, Botswana and South Africa where presently 2,000 people die of HIV every day. How can a country survive if more than half the pregnant women have HIV? How can we stand by and do nothing while entire countries are allowed to die, the men and women first and the children last and alone?
HIV/AIDS has already killed 25 million people since the first documented case in 1981. Thirty-five million worldwide are now infected, that exceeds the population of Canada and most of those infected are women and children the most vulnerable of society.
Combine the number of dead with those that will die, and the number exceeds 65 million and counting. A mounting human catastrophe.
We are witnessing the power of the greatest pandemic, the greatest humanitarian crisis in history and it is coinciding, not by chance, with the greatest environmental crisis ever faced and that crisis is threatening the very life of our planet. Both ignited by greed and fuelled by our apathy.
For more information on HIV/AIDS: www.unaids.org