The HIV/AIDS pandemic includes infections in about every nook and cranny of the world, from the African country of Botswana to the Hoosier heartland of Bloomington.\nIndiana residents, students and guests gathered for a panel discussion about "AIDS in Africa" Wednesday night, held by the Bloomington chapter of Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbian and Gays at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 2120 N. Fee Ln. The panel of health care workers and student educators highlighted the current plight of the HIV/AIDS-ravished African continent through personal testimony about working face-to-face with victims in African classrooms and disease-riddled clinics of the sub-Saharan landscape.\nOf the more than 39 million reported international cases of HIV/AIDS infection, more than 25 million -- about 64 percent -- resided in sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, according to global estimates from UNAIDS, a Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. In addition, more than 3 million new HIV infections and more than 2 million AIDS-related deaths were reported in sub-Saharan Africa last year.\nPanel speakers included senior Kristin Demning, an IU-Purdue University Indianapolis nursing student and clinical assistant at Planned Parenthood; junior Elana Habib, co-director of the IU student group Outreach Kenya Development and Volunteers; Debra Phelps, an oncology clinical nurse educator at Bloomington Hospital; David Adams, publisher of the Indiana Daily Student; and Kathryn Brown, a health educator at the IU Health Center.\nThe panel discussion also involved a short documentary film and diorama display promoting IU's OKDV efforts to educate Kenyan youth about HIV/AIDS and photographs spotlighting extreme poverty in South African neighborhoods from Demning. \n"When you are talking about AIDS in Africa, it's broad," Habib said. "HIV/AIDS infection rates are on a spectrum. There are 53 countries within the African continent -- some countries have no significant problem, others have a huge problem. The rest are in between." \nSub-Saharan Africa, in particular, possesses more than 10 percent of the world's population but is home to more than 60 percent of the world's people living with HIV/AIDS, according to UNAIDS. North Africa, on the other hand, is often categorized with the Middle East and contains less than 1 percent of the world's people living with HIV/AIDS.\n \nSOCIAL AND POLITICAL CAUSE\nDemning said her nursing experiences in South Africa taught her about common social and political problems often associated with combating HIV/AIDS epidemics. She cited state-legislated apartheid, "blood-mining" in the diamond mine industry, an increase in migrant work and government denial until 2000 about the link between HIV and AIDS as potential sparks igniting infection rates throughout South Africa. \n"Preventing HIV/AIDS infections involves more than education. Putting more condoms out will not stop the spread of HIV and AIDS," Demning said. "There must be social and political changes of ideas about HIV/AIDS education. The socioeconomic status of women prevents them from keeping safe because their men have no job opportunities and they are forced into migrant work. The women involve themselves in sex work and the men also bring HIV/AIDS home."\nPhelps also visited South Africa, specifically Johannesburg and Cape Town. She said South Africa has about six HIV/AIDS public treatment facilities, staffing about 54 to 60 nurses, to serve an estimated 350,000 infected people.\nPrivate clinics, providing adequate medicines, are often available to only those specific few who can afford HIV/AIDS infection care.\n"Their nursing profession is extremely organized, they just don't have enough staff to treat and care for everybody," she said. "The infrastructure is there. The health care system is there. What they really need is the money just to expand what they already have."\nAccording to UNAIDS, young women and girls are more susceptible to HIV than men and boys. Their vulnerability is primarily due to inadequate knowledge about AIDS, insufficient access to HIV prevention services, inability to negotiate safe sex and a lack of female-controlled HIV prevention methods.\nDemning also discussed violence against women in South Africa and the effect of numerous "myths of HIV cures" that continue to spread throughout the country. Specifically, she cited the false belief some men have about having "intercourse with a virgin" to cure their HIV/AIDS. \n"I think a lot of the myths start, as a lot of myths do, with the hope and desire to live when you have something that is going to kill you," she said. "I was working at a trauma care center and a 3-month-old baby was brought in that had been raped ... You hope to cure yourself."\nAIDS and poverty are now mutually reinforcing negative forces in many developing countries, according to a news release from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Where individuals and communities are able to realize their rights -- to education, free association, information and, most importantly, non-discrimination -- the personal and societal impacts of HIV and AIDS are reduced.
HIV/AIDS BROUGHT HOME\nPresident Bush announced in his 2003 State of the Union address his administration's intention to fund the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a $15 billion initiative to be paid throughout five years "to turn the tide in combating the global HIV/AIDS pandemic," according to a White House news release. That amount was to include $1 billion for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.\nBush's Leadership Against HIV/AIDS Act of 2003 focuses on 14 specific countries designated by the president as "focus" nations, 12 of which are African: Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.\nThe United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization's 3X5 Initiative also address the infection pandemic and promises to provide the financial resources necessary to combat continued worldwide infection rates.\nReversing the HIV/AIDS plague of sub-Saharan Africa might involve more than pledges of international aid. Acting out against increasing HIV/AIDS infections often involves participant fieldwork, including direct contact with those individuals most at risk for infection.\nAdams said he "couldn't help but witness" the carnage from high HIV/AIDS rates during his time in Zambia. He spoke of a cemetery he visited in which he observed one mound of fresh dirt on the first visit, five mounds during the second visit, hundreds of mounds during his third and "acres of mounds in a closed cemetery" during his fourth visit. \nAdams said his trip to Zambia lasted five weeks, enough time for HIV/AIDS infections to kill off thousands of people.\n"Even though I wasn't there for AIDS you couldn't miss it. About 30 percent of the population was infected at the time," he said. "Most people have no money to be treated, let alone to be tested. If the orphaned children make it to adulthood, they will be an interesting problem for the world."\nHabib said the availability of modern medicine for Americans often causes apathetic attitudes about international HIV/AIDS infection rates. She also cited the common misperception of some sexually active individuals who believe "HIV/AIDS can not happen to me." \n"People should have more open minds about this disease," Habib said. "People say (HIV/AIDS) is God's punishment or it's a gay disease -- you deserve it because you are promiscuous. If people had more open minds and spoke more openly about it, we would see a reduction to the pandemic."\nPhelps said the time she spent in South Africa taught her about being a member of "a global community." She said she observed a "wide range of cultures and colors" clinging to hope as people affected by HIV/AIDS and not infected by it.\n"They are people just like we are and we are not immune. Anything that happens elsewhere can come home," Phelps said. "Why are we allowing it to happen there when we wouldn't allow it to happen here?"\n-- Contact City & State Editor David A. Nosko at dnosko@indiana.edu.
