In Toronto, Bush Spurns AIDS Leadership

[davidbikman]

In Toronto, the sixteenth International Conference on AIDS has just wrapped up, and yet another chance for the media to highlight the failure of U.S. leadership in the fight against AIDS has passed. With 26,057 attendees, the largest AIDS conference ever held gathered doctors, civil servants, and activists from hundreds of countries to compare treatment and prevention strategies, establish and strengthen relationships among researchers and scientists, and share news of their struggle with the world. And in a major slap in the face to the AIDS community, the United States sent zero high-level representatives to the conference. According to Democracy Now, the few lower-level researchers and scientists from the U.S. who were allowed to come were so cowed by the Bush government's stance on AIDS that they wouldn't even allow themselves to be named for fear of losing their jobs.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post covered criticism of South Africa's AIDS program by a U.N. official, but ignored the United States government's abandonment of the conference and the chill reception U.S. officials would have received had they shown up.

Trying to understand the fight against AIDS without considering the role of the United States is like talking about computers without mentioning Microsoft. The United States is the five hundred pound gorilla of AIDS prevention, treatment, and research: when that gorilla moves, the world responds, and to pretend otherwise is disturbingly naive. Consider this factoid from the Post's David Brown:

There was also disturbing news out of Uganda, which for years has been the African model of a winning battle against AIDS.

HIV infection rates at a sample of 24 prenatal clinics fell from 1992 to 2000. In seven, the fall has continued, and in seven it has leveled off, but in 10 it is rising. In a rural population sample, HIV prevalence in men rose from 5.6 to 6.5 percent in the past four years and in women from 6.9 to 8.8 percent.

The precise reason for this is unknown, but the researchers said it shows that prevention efforts must not let up.

But rising infection rates in Uganda are only a puzzle when you remove the United States from the equation. The Bush administration has demanded that AIDS prevention funds in Uganda (and many other African countries) be used for "abstinence education" and anti-condom propoganda, a stance that doctors, civil servants, and AIDS activists say only hastens the spread of the virus. Dr Jotham Musinguzi, director of Uganda's Population Secretariat at the Ministry of Finance, for example, says that "There are some prominent people in government, and some outside, who with the help of conservative agents in the U.S. are stigmatising AIDS, saying that only sinners use a condom. That is the message we are struggling with."

He's not alone. The so-called "ABC" approach (Abstinence/Be Faithful/Use a Condom) pushed by the United States would be the laughingstock of AIDS activists if it weren't so deadly. In a plenary session at the Toronto conference, Indian human rights lawyer Arnand Grover said that "President Bush and the US Congress need to be told that the so called ABC approach is killing people in the U.S. and in the rest of the world."

The sad fact is that the United States has lost most of its credibility among AIDS doctors, activists, government officials, and non-governmental organizations throughout the world. With the Bush administration's insistence that U.S. funds in Africa be spent on "abstinence education," coupled with its refusal to allow countries like Brazil and India to produce inexpensive generic versions of lifesaving AIDS medicines, its track record of lying about the effectiveness of condom use in stopping the virus, and its inability to confront the role that marital rape and gender inequality play in spreading the virus in Africa, the United States under Dubya has essentially abandoned the AIDS-infected world. Mainstream media leaders, who could do so much to contextualize the current state of AIDS research, prevention, and treatment by examining the impact of U.S. policy, have not yet done so.


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