HIV/AIDS Relief

No doubt about it, HIV/AIDS has proven to be a dreadful killer, a miserable scourge on the human landscape. It's a very particular kind of life-destroyer, and when it first surfaced three decades ago, it was identified as a horrendously regrettable tragedy visited upon gays. In the early-to-mid 1980s, fundamentalist preachers in the United States thundered from their pulpits that this festering killer of an ailment was God's divine punishment against sinners, men who enjoyed sex with one another.

All of a sudden bath houses became true nests of iniquity resulting in divine judgement laying sinners low. The dreadful suffering and hopelessness of those afflicted horrified society at large. Just when homosexuals were finally beginning to make some headway in societal acceptance. As human beings who were not truly maladjusted with a corrupted sense of sexuality, but rather people whose gender-and-sex orientation was ordained by genetic inheritance, not a perverse set of social values.

The medical-health community swung into action, with medical science desperately attempting to find solutions, short-term first, then a focus on long-term. There was a kind of socially-communicable hysteria, in the wake of countless tragedies. Young men were dying miserable deaths and the community - apart from the divine judgement crews - hardly knew how to react.

At first any direct physical contact with sufferers was thought to be sufficient exposure to contract AIDS. Eventually, compassion, reason and scientific evidence directed that society face the need to give aid and assistance, and withhold judgement toward those so dreadfully afflicted. Well publicized stories of loss and mourning were rampant, affecting society at every level.

And then attention turned outward to the growing realization that it was not just young healthy males in the United States whose lives were being struck down, but a much larger community of men - and women as well, becoming infected with HIV/AIDS, and endowing their children with it, as well, in Africa, in South-East Asia, just about everywhere. In the early 1990s countries as diverse as Russia, China and Japan steadfastly asserted there was no AIDS in their countries.

With the eventual discovery of pharmaceuticals which were able to ameliorate the deadly effects of AIDS, and eventually turn it into a manageable but-still-dire illness, the tide of death finally turned. A massive self-help education campaign did its part in teaching people how to avoid contracting HIV-AIDS, to take elementary hygienic precautions. And in the developed world cautionary practices and medication managed to control the epidemic.

It's been far more of an existential struggle for huge populations in developing countries afflicted by that double scourge. We cared because the world at large was taught that this was a deadly menace from whose effects no one could be deemed safe; it would strike anyone, men, women, children. There was a hugely growing population of AIDS-orphaned children whose grandparents had to undertake the onerous task of raising their grandchildren, people who themselves lived on the edge of economic need.

A funny thing happened on the way to control and management of AIDS. People in the west, now realizing that it's no longer necessarily a death sentence for those who can afford, or whose government subsidizes the affordability of AIDS drugs. It was no longer viewed as the fearsome disease it once was thought to be. An end-of-life threat. Vulnerable groups began relaxing their vigilance, and as a result, re-creating the same conditions which brought HIV/AIDS into existence to begin with.

Developing countries whose governments strove to control the dread epidemic by teaching abstinence and control and fidelity to life-partners and who met with success, saw their struggle undermined by AIDS experts and social lifestyle activists who decried those solutions as limiting peoples' sexual freedoms. And vast amounts of public funds continued to pour into AIDS policies and solutions through research funding.

In the process limiting funds available for diseases which have been responsible for taking infinitely more lives than HIV/AIDS. A distortion in public and government perceptions about the prevalence and effect of HIV/AIDS has given it a higher profile than many other common tropical diseases, among them malaria, yellow fever, cholera, dysentery, dengue fever, influenza, meningococcal disease; all of which can be avoided and handily treated.

"Easily preventable diseases are still killing millions of children each year, while billions of dollars are being squandered annually by AIDS programs", according to Dr. James Chin, a former AIDS epidemiologist at the World Health Organization. And Robert England, head of the charity Health Systems Workshop, writing in the British Medical Journal came to similar conclusions.

"Although HIV causes 3.7% of worldwide mortality, it receives 25% of international health care aid." Others in influential positions of knowledge agree: "In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention" according to Sam Ruteikara, Uganda's National AIDS-Prevention Committee co-chair. "AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry."

Isn't that the way of the world? People are basically opportunists, and when a trend surfaces for whatever reason that has the attention of the world, and money is to be raised to assist in combating dread conditions or diseases, agencies are formed for that very purpose. Charitable enterprises, international charitable corporations whose function and purpose of existence is to raise funds. The greater the funds raised, the larger their administration.

In the process making themselves and their services indispensable to the purpose at hand. They perpetuate themselves as a singular and very particular industry. It's in the world's best interests to create just conditions of fairness in the struggle against poverty, inequality and incidents of disease epidemics, and these industries ally themselves with government agencies for the provision of emergency aid.

An industry among industries, albeit "charitable" by nature and nomenclature, to address all the miseries of the world.