HIV/AIDS

THE RAPID SPREAD OF HIV through all social strata and all sexual orientations has proved that the initial risk categories and the identification of the virus with gay men make little sense. Yet with the passing of years, the true risk category linked to the virus may be that of the poor, with poverty representing a considerable risk factor.

The AIDS epidemic is not only a health issue but also a socioeconomic and security issue. AIDS has killed millions of adults, reducing the workforce, exacerbating famine, impoverishing families, and orphaning millions of children in the regions hardest hit. As Stephen Lewis, the United Nations (UN) special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, has put it in his notes on one of his travels to Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia, there is a clear link between hunger and AIDS.

Western governments are all too often hiding behind the doubt that the African developing countries may not even have the will to fight the virus. During his travels, Lewis noticed “how even in the most extreme of circumstances, such as those which prevail today in the four nations [he] visited, Africans are engaged in endless numbers of initiatives and projects and programs and models which, if taken to scale, if generalized throughout the country, would halt the pandemic, and prolong and save millions of lives.” Yet African countries lack adequate financial resources to face the pandemic effectively, and Lewis defines this shortage as “mass murder by complacency”: “This pandemic cannot be allowed to continue, and those who watch it unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must be held to account. There may yet come a day when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with this particular version of crimes against humanity.”

Lewis's account goes on to detail the links between poverty and AIDS, which, according to the UN special envoy, were visible everywhere: “In Malawi, for example, analysis of the data shows that 50 percent of poor households are affected by chronic illness due to HIV/AIDS. You can’t till the soil, grow the crops, feed the family, when disease stalks the land.” Lewis appeals to G-8 countries to augment their contributions to the Global Fund so that African countries may be provided with the necessary resources to fight the pandemic.

Yet he also concludes that the Global Fund seems more ready to finance wars (the report was written a few months before the second Gulf War) than schemes to fight AIDS in developing countries. The account of the UN special envoy shows the grip of poverty on people living with AIDS in Third World nations and the reluctance of the more industrially developed countries to intervene. While poverty and AIDS are now firmly associated with one another, when the virus made its first appearance in the 1980s, such a link was ignored and the pandemic was considered only a Western phenomenon, limited to risk categories.

As Sharon Walker reminds us, although the virus spread rapidly through developing countries right from its discovery, no links were made between the Western victims of AIDS and those who died from it in Africa. In the late 1970s, the virus was identified as a disease of the gay community as a group of gay men from San Francisco and Los Angeles showed signs of rare opportunistic diseases. The very name initially given to the virus, GRID (Gay Related Immunodeficiency), points to the first definition of the virus as a new “gay plague.”

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