AIDS in Africa—A Warning to the World!
“IF YOU have 1 lover per year for 6 years, and so do all your lovers, you will virtually have had sexual contact with 45 000 people.” This simple calculation by Dr. K. E. Sapire, quoted in the South African journal Continuing Medical Education illustrates the enormous potential for AIDS infection that exists for the promiscuous.
So why focus on Africa?
Because what is happening there is a warning to the world. Africa is not the only place where promiscuity is rampant. It is a global phenomenon. “Ultimately,” says AIDS expert Dr. Dennis Sifris, “every sexually active person in the world with more than one partner is potentially at risk.” Similarly, according to the magazine U.S.News & World Report, by today’s standards even “marriage is no guarantor of heterosexuality—or of fidelity—and hence no perfect shield against AIDS.”
Thus, for good reasons, the journal African Affairs warns: “The epidemic could be replicated elsewhere.” All indications are that Africa’s crisis is already in the process of being repeated in many other parts of the world.
Newsweek magazine reports that in Brazil, for example, “soaring numbers of heterosexuals have caught AIDS from their infected lovers.” The health ministry of that country estimates that already half a million are HIV positive. “If nothing is done,” says Dr. Carlos Alberto Morais de Sá, director of AIDS research at Rio de Janeiro’s Gaffrée e Guinle University Hospital, “we’re going to be faced with a public health calamity.”
The United States too is threatened. “While the number of heterosexual cases is relatively tiny,” reports Time magazine, “it jumped 40% last year [1990], faster than any other category.” The week after it was revealed that the famous athlete Magic Johnson had contracted AIDS via heterosexual contact, telephone lines to medical services were clogged by panic-stricken people clamoring for more information about the disease.
Asia is also sending out ominous signals of an impending catastrophe. That part of the globe has experienced an increase in HIV positivity from almost nothing in 1988 to more than a million today! “African levels of infection will seem modest in comparison,” predicts Dr. Jim McDermott, reporting back after a fact-finding mission to Asia. He adds: “I am convinced Asia is the sleeping giant of a worldwide Aids epidemic.”
Trying to pin the blame for the origin and spread of AIDS on any one particular continent or national group is pointless and futile. Dr. June Osborn, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, U.S.A., put it bluntly: “It’s not who you are but what you do.”
Will AIDS continue to wreak its havoc everywhere? Is there a solution, or will AIDS eventually depopulate vast areas of the continent of Africa and other parts of the world?
[Picture Credit Line on page 8]
WHO photo by H. Anenden; background: NASA photo