Ignorance and prejudices still block the fight against AIDS

The fight against the disease is showing huge progress, but in some areas it faces a deadly combination of ignorance, religion, taboos, discrimination and political irresponsibility, says the journalist Astrid Prange. the fight against the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a question of political will. Which prevents clarification and prevention; who defends family values, but pbades infected women and children to their own fate; marginalizing drug users; who turns homobaduals into scapegoats, blocks progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS and becomes guilty

And the advances in this fight are enormous. They show that it is possible to lead a decent life with the disease. They show that the spread of the epidemic has slowed down thanks to a combination of enlightenment, medical progress, global solidarity and responsible health policy. They show that the fear of death has diminished and that AIDS is increasingly a chronic disease, which is also true for poor countries.

The fight against AIDS is therefore a great success. By the way: in 2017, 22 million of the 37 million people living with HIV in the world were treated with anti-AIDS drugs. Of these, 4 million live in South Africa, the country with the largest number of HIV programs run by the state. The number of deaths from AIDS has fallen to less than 1 million in 2017, for the first time in this century.

The positive results are most visible in Botswana, the country with the second-largest spread of HIV (17% of the population). Between 2010 and 2017, the percentage of patients on antiretroviral therapy with AIDS increased from 50% to 84%. As a result, the number of deaths per year has risen from 18,000 in 2003 to 4,000 in 2017.

In light of this positive badessment, attention is drawn to the developments in Europe in the past. East and Central Asia. In these regions, a deadly combination of ignorance, religious beliefs, tradition, taboos, discrimination and political irresponsibility threatens to undermine progress.

The situation is particularly dramatic in Russia where, according to UNAIDS, there are about 1 million HIV-positive people. . The annual number of new infections has increased from 50,000 in 2004 to 100,000 in 2017. Only 360,000 people have access to treatment.

This negative spiral in Russia is fueled, among other factors, by the disregard of international standards for treating HIV and AIDS, which have been hard won. There, where religious leaders call "divine chastisement" and where nationalist politicians claim to "protect families," women die after being infected by their husbands, and children come into the world with the potentially lethal virus, even when they are dead. It is possible to avoid transmission

When human life is worth little, the treatment of AIDS carriers is not a priority. Why invest in the public health system if AIDS continues to be perceived as a "plague of homobaduals" (a term used by the German magazine Der Spiegel in a cover story in 1983)?

When it comes to AIDS, the time has come for the truth: why organize school clarifications and collect donations if they are the patients themselves? The way to cope with the epidemic reveals not only the degree of competence and humanity of political and religious leaders: it reveals the human face – or inhuman – of a whole society.

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