Good news about AIDS

HIV/AIDS is still incurable, despite the claims of some peddlers of alternative medicine that "all diseases can be cured." Improvements in drugs have meant that the lifespan of persons who have contracted the virus has been significantly extended.

Even before these drugs were available, an individual could expect ten healthy years, once he or she took reasonable care of themselves. With the drugs, more years can be expected, and precautions can also be taken to ensure that the foetuses of mothers with HIV/AIDS are not born with the virus.

The challenge, however, is to contain the infection rate. In this battle, the search for a cure, odd as it may seem, is secondary. In medical history, many diseases were contained long before a cure was found.

This was accomplished by bringing about lifestyle changes — in some cases, such as tuberculosis, simply improving public hygiene stifled epidemics before a vaccine was invented.

In similar fashion, those countries which have brought down their HIV infection rates to manageable levels have accomplished this by focusing on altering sexual behaviour in specific and practical ways.

In identifying the reasons which have helped reduce infection rates in the region, Dr Hospedales listed political commitment, an expanded approach to prevention and control, the scaling up of care and treatment, and the introduction of anti-retroviral drugs. Notably absent from this list is "abstinence and morals" which, according to a statement made by Health Minister John Rahael in July, is his ministry’s new focus in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

There is nothing wrong with this, if the policy is a new shaft in the quiver of anti-AIDS arrows.

If, however, the Health Ministry intends to push abstinence and morals in lieu, or in favour, of all the other strategies, this is completely unacceptable.

It is unacceptable because, as the latest figures show, the public policies that have been pushed for the past ten years or more have finally begun to take effect. To falter now could be disastrous.

Uganda is one country which has fallen into this trap.

Long cited as just about the only African country which was able to contain the AIDS epidemic, the Ugandan government has recently modified the policy which reduced its AIDS-infection rate from 15 percent in 1991 to a mere five percent in 2001.

This laudable result was obtained by bringing the disease out into the open and promoting abstinence, faithfulness, and condom use.

Now, under funding pressure from the Bush administration in Washington, the Ugandan government has begun to push abstinence-only instead, while no longer distributing free condoms save to high-risk groups, such as prostitutes.

No doubt the effects of this new strategy will be revealed within a few years.

If it works, then Uganda will have caused a rethink of international strategy.

However, if it does not work, it will mean that the Bush administration, in tandem with the Ugandan government, has helped cause needless deaths.

Whatever the result, we hope that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago will not be carrying out a similar experiment here. This country has made some progress in the fight against AIDS.

Now is the moment to intensify what has worked so far.