AIDS 2012: Going Beyond Figures;Facing the Scaring Reality

On Sunday ,July 23rd, as the 19th International AIDS conference opened in  Washington DC, I got very curious and wanted to know how news on this very important event was been reported by local and international media houses. Undertaking this task, little did I know the discovery that my curiosity will lead me to. Talking of discoveries, they were all very bitter; in the first place in the local media it was business as usual with very little or no allusion being made of this year’s international conference on AIDS and then there was this paper on the conference by French news channel ITele which in my opinion was much more centered on the statistics and the fact that this conference was being held in the USA than on the plight of persons living with HIV/AIDS(PLWHA) and the ever growing number of children which AIDS daily render orphans in this part of the world.

35 Million Deaths and 35 million infected persons most of whom live in Africa with a majority of them being women. The above among others are the plethora of figures given by ITele’s reporter in the above cited paper. Since its discovery in the early 90s using statistics as the key elements to describing the effect AIDS on people around the world has gained grounds to the extent that the only thing most people can remember about AIDS is the number of people it is killing. I remember that my while at secondary school when asked to describe what AIDS was, my class mates and I will almost ever start with something like this: AIDS is a very dangerous disease that kills millions of people around the world.

At the time I described AIDS as above, I had of course never met a person living with HIV/AIDS, growing up and knowing persons living with HIV/AIDS and the precarious conditions in which these people live in Cameroon has led to a glaring reality that what really matters in talking about HIV/AIDS is not the statistics but how those living with the AIDS virus are treated in their families, communities, and countries.

AIDS is still considered in some parts of Cameroon as being a punishment for one’s sins and those suffering from the disease are considered as outcasts and excluded from mainstream society. This stigma against PLWA has not only heightened people’s fear for the disease but also increased the rates of infections as most people in Cameroon have not done and are not willing to do an HIV/AIDS screening test. A few who go for the test and are tested positive really ever inform their family members of their status neither do they seek medical advice and so die in silence. This fact has been pointed out by the numerous health surveys conducted in Cameroon with statistics from the 2011 health survey showing that the Northern regions of Cameroon (densely populated with high illiteracy and early marriage rates) having the highest number of PLWHA in Cameroon.

While it is true that to face facts, we need to face the figures, when the figures overshadow the facts, full understanding of the gravity of a problem is at risk. While I understand the excitement of media persons at this year’s international conference on AIDS being held in the USA, something which was impossible before 2009 when the ban imposed on zero positive persons in the early 90s was lifted, I am deeply convinced that beyond statistics there is a scaring reality which we must face: AIDS is committing more atrocities than the so many we pretend we know.

Having closely followed Cameroon’s strategy to fight against HIV/AIDS over the years, I can comfortably say that: it doesn’t suffice to make antiretroviral free, how those living on these anti retroviral drugs are perceived and treated also matters. Let’s face reality, if we continue to consider the fight against AIDS to be the scientists sacred cow, we are going to woefully fail, because the fight against AIDS requires much more than pure science, it requires a fundamental change in the way PLWA are being currently perceived. Stigma kills more than the HIV virus itself and needs to be tackled with equal measure as the search for a cure to AIDS.

It is time we face and denounce the scaring reality of stigmatization, guilt, persecution, pain, and death that is lived daily by millions of people around the world because they are infected by HIV/AIDS. Being infected with the HIV virus in most cases in this part of the world mean forfeiting one’s right to education, health, and shelter. Therefore, I am convinced that while it is true that AIDS kills zero positive persons around the world, stigma, guilt, and persecution, and ignorance fastens these deaths. This year’s international AIDS conference will live to be remembered if and only if its participants go beyond figures and face this scaring reality.

Poverty Begins When We Fail to Act!

Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.

As the world celebrated its 7th Million baby on the 1st of November 2011, the above words of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan kept ringing in my head and I could not help but ask myself why the so much celebration at the birth of a child who like majority of the world’s children born in the global south have no guarantee of having 3 meals a day , talk less of ever seeing the four walls of a classroom before they die.

Sad as the facts above may be, more sad is even the fact that while humanity is busy celebrating technological advancement and an ever growing number of billionaires, a part of humanity is perishing in silence. In its 2011 State of the World’ s Children Report, UNICEF the world’s premier Children’s organization reported that 7.6 million children died before they were 5 years old in 2010. The fact that these children died from preventable diseases and effects of poverty even makes me more ashamed of being part of a world in which a minority, which though having the means to help out, are so indifferent to the suffering and pains of others.

Who can believe that in a world with majority of its people living in urban areas, a child dies every 4 seconds from preventable causes? We marvel at the riches of those who billionaires which Forbes profiles year-in and year-out. But do we for an instance stop to think about those people in a little village somewhere in Cameroon called Bafmeng where women give birth at the help of torch lights and where parents cannot afford 3 dollars to register their children in school.

I am intimately convinced that the greatness of a people is measured by the care accorded its children and those among them who cannot afford to provide their children the tools and opportunities to become people on whom society can count.

Are you among those who think there is nothing you can do for the world’s children? Do you believe the world is a global village with the fate of its inhabitants more interlinked than never before? Then there is something you can do, however small, to contribute to the achievement of the aspiration of parents the world over –that of given birth to a child and seeing that child grow to become an adult-which is was recognized in the year 2010 by the UN by making the reduction of infant mortality one of its Millennium Development Goals(MDGs). Join one of the numerous networks of the thousand of people who with lots passion and engagement have willingly decided to fight poverty to the last drop of their blood .
Yes! Poverty ultimately begins when we fail to act to uphold the dignity of our fellow beings. As we celebrate world population Day in 2012, let’s all act for greater access of women and children to health facilities.