h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This thing has been going on for quite a long time, a few years. It has an entire history behind it. First of all, Thabo Mbeki's own education was marxistically oriented, and at the moment he's still very distrustful of capitalist countries. The AIDS crisis is mostly a thing of the past decade. Okay, now certain pharmaceutical companies have developed certain drugs that work against AIDS - they don't destroy it but they slow down its activity. These drugs cost money. My sister is a doctor and she assures me that these drugs do work, for instance if a pregnant woman has AIDS and uses them, she will have a good chance to give birth to a healthy baby, whereas without them the baby will very probably be born with AIDS. So many people are recommending a program whereby the government should assist pregnant women by giving them this drug for free. So far so good - but the drug does have serious side effects, for one thing. When the choices are between side effects and death, of course you choose to live even if you suffer side effects. But the government has somehow grabbed on to the side effects issue and said that they will not spend money on a treatment that might be dangerous. Alright, but you can still save lives. Some people have come with figures indicating how much money the country will loose as a result of NOT treating people - not treating them turns out to be far more costly than treating them. But the government needs a way out, because it can't afford treating these people. So new complications have been introduced. There is a group of people in the world, sometimes called AIDS dissidents, they are scientists who say they can prove that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS. According to them AIDS is not a single, simple thing but a problem caused by a number of factors, such as poverty, malnutrition, pollution, and also the effects of the drugs used to treat AIDS! In other words people die partly as a result of the treatment they're given! Now president Mbeki has for some reason jumped for this theory. He has publicly proclaimed so on numerous occasions. This theory is attractive to him because: 1)then the government does not have to spend money on anti-AIDS medication 2) the AIDS epidemic can now be seen to have something to do with global inequality, which is mostly the fault of the capitalists. Note that these people say that the HIV virus has nothing to do with causing AIDS. They'll even say that the HIV virus might be a symptom of the disease, not a cause. This also means that there's no reason to practice safe sex - you're not going to spread poverty through sex, are you?

Well that's the theory. So I think you may understand why the kids are confused when even the adults can't agree among themselves!

Thanks for that explanation - it makes the situation a lot clearer.

Interesting - and not surpising - that politicians are the same the world over, in that they leap on a scrap of information and manage to twist it to their own devices. Lies, damned lies, statistics, and politics.

I still wonder what's going to happen here. Today I again read something about how badly AIDS will affect agriculture in South Africa. Huge numbers of farm laborers are dying, and this among other things does not bode well for our economy. Some sectors suffer worse from the crisis than others - but the entire country will suffer. There will soon be huge numbers of orphans. Children will have to raise themselves because we just can't take care of them all.