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HIV/AIDS in the News
Posted on August 02, 2004
If you've watched iThemba and I Promise Africa, then you have a sense of the devastating AIDS epidemic in Africa and the urgent need for better education, prevention and medicine.
A recent article from the New York Times, is a reminder of the ongoing devastation. In Durban South Africa, so many people are dying of AIDS, that there are not enough graves:
"Five years ago, we used to have about 120 funerals a weekend, but this number has now jumped to 600," Thembinkosi Ngcobo, who heads the municipal department of parks and cemeteries, said in an interview this week. "In order to cope with the current rate of mortality - we hope it is not going to increase - we will need to have 12.1 hectares every year of new gravesites." That is nearly 30 acres. "That would obviously turn Durban and the whole country into one big graveyard if we continue," he said. The statistics offer little encouragement. Roughly one in eight South Africans is H.I.V.-positive, and in Durban, South Africa's third-largest city with about 3.5 million people, a survey two years ago of women at pregnancy clinics found about 35 percent were infected with H.I.V.
Part of the difficulty in stemming the epidemic is the lack of contraceptions and safe-sex education. And unfortunately, the United States' global AIDS relief package comes with some strings attached: an amendment to the bill designates 33 percent of prevention funds for abstinence-only programs.
A recent article from Alternet tells the story of Representative Barbara Lee of California. Last month, at the AIDS meeting in Bangkok, she presented a bill - the New U.S. Global HIV Prevention Strategy to Address the Needs of Women and Girls Act - that seeks to eradicate the U.S. administration's abstinence-only approach to AIDS.
Lend your voice to the debate by calling your leaders through DATA.