I’ve spent the last week learning all I can about the AIDS crisis in Zambia. (This is for a future project that may or may not happen.) Official crabwalk.com advice: If you want to be a happy person, do not spend a week learning all you can about the AIDS crisis in Zambia.
To recap: 21 percent of all Zambian adults are HIV-positive. 61 percent of Zambian teenaged girls think you get AIDS from mosquito bites or witchcraft. About 15 percent of the nation’s children are AIDS orphans. Seven percent of Zambian households are led by a child 14 or younger. Reports of rapes and sexual assaults have more than doubled in the last two years, particularly among young girls. The nation’s educational system, health system, and economy are all bordering on collapse. Average life expectancy has dropped by 11 years since 1990.
The really scary thing: Zambia’s not the worst off country in sub-Saharan Africa. In Botswana, the adult infection rate is almost 40 percent. Of the 15-year-old boys in Botswana today, between 65 and 90 percent will die of AIDS. (Take a look at Figure 7.)
I need a beer.
3 thoughts on “zambian aids”
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For years, I wanted to go and teach in Botswana. This was before the end of apartheid and Botswana seemed like an island of stability in the region. Who knew? I wonder what would happen if the world spent 1% of what they spend on war on dealing with this crisis.
One of the aspects of the crisis that gets me the most is the lack of education about how AIDS spreads or how to prevent it. Young girls are infected at such a high rate because of the prevalent idea among men that having sex with a young virgin girl will “cure” him of AIDS. And when husbands with truck-driving jobs leave for extended periods of time, sex with prostitutes on the road is common. Then when their husbands return home, the more AIDS-aware wives try to convince their husbands to wear condoms, risking severe abuse. A lot of things are going to have to change, but what exactly and how are the questions, I guess.
I wrote a long research paper on international law and the AIDS crisis in Africa a few years ago. I drew heavily on my experience when working as a UN inHuman Rights intern for Dr. Jonathan Mann – one of the founders of the UNAIDS programme in 1996. ( Dr. Mann was a pioneer and the foremost authority in the field of the human rights of persons infected with HIV. He died tragically, along with his wife ,in the Swissair plane crash on September 2, 1998, en route to the World Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva.)
Zambia is an especially difficult situation, not only for the cultural barriers mentioned, but also because of it’s corrupt, autocratic government. One of the most important lessons that came out of the Zambia tour was that they must allow NGOs to set up and run actual programmes – not just a request for funding. There was pretty good evidence that some in the government there actually were against containing the spread of HIV, because they were receiving ever-higher levels of funding, which they diverted to other interests.
Zambia also has a couple thousand deaths every day from starvation. However, they do attribute some of these deaths to AIDS, instead – so they can raise their rates and thus receive grater funding. It’s a complex situation.
It is also tragic that the environmental nuts and anti-GM people have convinced the Zambian regime to reject GM crops, which could save all of their starving population.