Bush and the GOP want to spend over one billion dollars of taxpayer dollars in Africa preaching abstinence, often using the questionable Uganda ABC program as an example. Theory is fine when having a discussion, but when millions of people are dying, practical real-world solutions are needed. In the real world, getting serious about prevention needs to addressed. This means promoting the use of condoms and safe sex, not preaching about supposed morals.
If current trends persist, sub-Saharan Africa, already reeling under the burden of nearly 25 million infected people and in the midst of a population boom, will face 36 million additional new infections by 2015, according to a report to be released this June by the Global H.I.V. Prevention Working Group. Treatment clinics will confront an ever-growing clientele and countless millions will die, said the panel of experts, which was convened by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“It is like running on a treadmill,” said Salim S. Abdool Karim, who directs the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa. “The faster you run, the more you stay in place.”
The panel blamed the lack of an intensive prevention effort for the continuing high rate of new infections. To some extent, the panel said, prevention has taken a back seat to treatment in the last several years. Developing nations are spending progressively less on prevention programs, the report said. Studies show donors are also gravitating toward financing treatment over prevention.
“Despite their promise, H.I.V. prevention efforts have received short shrift in the global H.I.V. response,” the report says.
That is partly because treatment programs produce tangible, dramatic evidence of money well spent, while an averted infection is almost impossible to show, even though prevention is more cost-effective in the long run, the panel’s experts say.
Congress needs to update the Bush plan for Africa and add a serious dose of reality to help make it as effective as possible. The religious right experiment has failed so move on.
