Monday, December 04, 2006 Oledan: Social vaccine By Radzini Oledan Slice Of Life
ON DECEMBER 1, multi-sectoral groups gathered in Davao City to celebrate the World Aids Day and bring the message to families that anyone could be vulnerable. It is both a public health and economic issue.
World Aids Day was first marked in 1991, an attempt by the international community to alert the public to the terrible scale of the threat posed by the disease.
Aids not only devastate families, it can devastate an entire economy. Unlike other diseases, Aids strikes at the productive heart of the economy: its workforce.
When workers become ill their productivity falls and they struggle to provide for their families. Communities can pull together to help each other, but when large numbers are afflicted, no one group can manage alone. The success of the whole economy will be damaged, exacerbating an already desperate situation for many.
Since the turn of the millennium, 24.2 have been infected, 15.6 million have died. According to the United Nations, some 40 million men, women and children are living with HIV.
Hardest hit are the 2 million HIV-affected children in Africa, who contracted the virus in the womb or during breastfeeding.
At the local level, complacency best describes public awareness, thinking that HIV AIDS will elude anyone who is not among those considered as high risk groups.
However, cases would show that despite advances in medical science and a growing political consensus over the need to act, the epidemic shows no signs of abating.
In fact, it is getting worse.
If left unabated, AIDS is predicted to surpass the Black Death of the 14th century as the deadliest outbreak of disease in human history.
However, the battle against the epidemic reveals the tragic irony and scandal of poverty. The emergence of antiretroviral drugs, for instance hailed by researchers as a "miracle", means that in the affluent West at least, HIV is now a treatable disease.
The tragic irony is that they are too expensive.
In Africa, doctors are forced to crush adult pills into child-sized doses just to enable afflicted children access the needed medication.
This is the same issue on universal access to Aids prevention, treatment, care and support.
Complacency in our local communities may one day result to several repercussions. The lack of long-term, predictable and stable financing for health abolishes the capacity of our health care system to train medical personnel and build the basic services needed to treat Aids. Elsewhere, there is a need to improve access to affordable medicines for the poorest.
More than anything else however, strong education provides a social vaccine against HIV AIDS. Keeping girls in school is one of the most effective ways of preventing Aids. Thus the need to improve sex education, promote safe sex and improve access to funding for proper protection against sexual infection.
Finally, the stigma that surrounds Aids must be tackled. People, especially women, living with HIV continue to be rejected in some areas by their families and communities and denied the right to healthcare, work, education and freedom of movement.
We do not pretend to know what the full impact of the Aids pandemic will be in the future, nor that averting these impacts would be easy. There are some basic areas however that all of us cannot afford to fail.
