Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 13 January 2000 — Page 3

The Muncie Times, January 13, 2000, page 3

Observe Martin Luther King Day

WORLD NEWS Ravaging AIDS epidemic is devastating Africa

It’s not in the headlines anymore. It’s seen as a concern of the past, not something we need to continue to be doing something about. It's still seen as a disease of gay men. But the fact is that HIV/AIDS is still alive and well in the world and killing millions of human beings—most of whom are black. In 1999 alone 2.6 million people died from AIDS, bringing to 16 million the number who have died from this disease worldwide since 1961. It’s not in the headlines. But AIDS is in our communities, around the world and is devastating our families. In the United States of America AIDS is increasingly a disease of the poor and of people of color and thus has become invisible. Worldwide, the pandemic is still wreaking havoc. Two recent studies by the United Nations show just how catastrophic AIDS really is. One showed that in Africa, where AIDS is rampaging across the whole continent and where it is overwhelmingly a heterosexual disease, there are now six women infected for every five men. There are more African women with HIV/AIDS than men. Indeed, there are now more than 22 million Africans infected with the AIDS virus and more than 12 million of them are women. Thus, the profile of AIDS on the continent of Africa is very different than what is here. But with more than 70 percent of the world’s infected living in Africa, these numbers become even more important. It is not an overstatement to say that the AIDS epidemic remains unabated in the developing world and threatens the viability of the continent of Africa. “AIDS has emerged as the single greatest threat to development

in many countries of the world,” said Dr. Peter Piot, head of the UN Program on HFV/AIDS. Life expectancy in Southern Africa, which had climbed to 59 in the early part of this decade is expected to fall to 45 in the next decade. Fewer than half of Southern Africans can expect to live to age 60, compared with 70 percent for developing countries and 90 percent for industrialized countries. When these numbers are coupled with the facts that in Africa while 200,000 people were killed in wars and conflicts in 1998, about 2.2 million died from AIDS, the gravity of thesituation begins to emerge. But AIDS is not only threatening the development of Africa, it is also threatening the political stability and the very structure of extended families upon which African society is built. African nations are among the world’s poorest and cannot afford the high costs of the medications which are controlling the dread disease in the United States. hr addition, many national health services are overwhelmed by the numbers of those needing treatment, while at the same time the countries have been forced to pay back their World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans, rather than invest in health care for their citizens. Moreover, the U. N. reports shows that 11 million children in the world have been orphaned by AIDS, 95 percent of whom are African. By this time next year that number is expected increase by another 2 million. These numbers have overwhelmed a continent which in the past brought orphaned children into age-old networks of immediate and extended

families and thus had few orphanages or formal ways of dealing with orphans. Many of these children are ending up as child laborers or roaming the streets, leaving them as prime targets for gangs, militia and child armies, such as those who were a part of the terror of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Yet the world’s response has been, at best, limited. Dr. Theo-Ben Gurirab, president of the U. N. General Assembly, pointed out that had so many children been orphaned in North America or Europe, “. . .their fate would have already been declared a human tragedy.” Indeed, if 10 million American or European children were orphaned today, the eyes of the world would have been turned to these victims of this dread disease and solutions to their problems would be in place. But the fact is that the industrialized nations have provided less than $500 million a year for International AIDS programs. Under President Qinton’s new budget the United States will increase its contribution to $225 million per year,

but millions more must be committed to worldwide AIDS efforts if we are really going to make a dent in the overwhelming needs of developing countries. Dec. 1 was World AIDS Day. But maybe every day needs to be a day when the world recognizes the devastation of AIDS and does something about it. Pharmaceutical companies, some of which have already responded to the worldwide crisis, can do more. Governments, which have already provided some funds, can do more. Churches and relief agencies, which have already provided some funds and services, can do more. You and I, who have already donated some funds and written some letters to our politicians, can do more. It is only if we all do more that the devastation of AIDS can be stopped. May it be so. Bernice Powell Jackson is executive director of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice based in Cleveland, Ohio.

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