Aids: African American Women Compared With African Women
...e the cell, HIV starts producing millions of little viruses, which eventually kill the cell and then out to infect other cells. All of the drugs marketed to treat HIV work by interfering with this process (National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention 2003). Now we know the definitions, what causes AIDS? We know that AIDS is caused by an infection with a virus called human immunodeficiency virus or HIV. This virus is passed from one person to another through blood-to-blood and sexual contact. In addition, infected pregnant women can pass HIV to their babies during pregnancy or delivery, as well as through breast feeding. This is where the problem lies between African and African American women contracting, living, and spreading AIDS (National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention 2003). African American communities are being ravaged and attacked by an epidemic of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Although a number of AIDS cases can be attributed to Injection Drug Use (IDU), too many of us; whether gay, straight, male or female, continue to have unprotected sex with multiple partners or people we barely know. The AIDS rate among Black women is three times as high as that among Latino women and 18 times as high as that among White women. Today Black women make up more than half of all women who have died of AIDS. African Americans make up 13 percent of the population, yet we now account for 41 percent of all AIDS cases in the United States. The Harvard AIDS Institute estimates that by the year 2000 more than half of all our country’s AIDS cases will be within the African American community. (site blackwomenshealth). However, as terrible as AIDS in the African American community, the numbers are no where as high as in Africa (HIV and AIDS: Facts That You Can’t Ignore 1999). Imagine your life this way. You get up in the morning and breakfast with your three kids. One is already doomed to die in infancy. Your husband works 200 miles away, comes home twice a year and sleeps around in between. You risk your life in every act of sexual intercourse. You go to work past a house where a teenager lives alone tending young siblings without any source of income. At another house, the wife was branded a whore when she asked her husband to use a condom, beaten silly and thrown into the streets. Over there lies a man desperately sick without access to a doctor or clinic or medicine or food or blankets or even a kind word. At work you eat with colleagues, and every third one is already fatally ill. You whisper about a friend who admitted she had the plague and whose neighbors stoned her to death. Your leisure is occupied by the funerals you attend every Saturday. You go to bed fearing adults your age will not live into their 40s. You and your neighbors and your political and popular leaders act as if nothing is happening (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). Across the southern quadrant of Africa, this nightmare is real. The word not spoken is AIDS, and here at ground zero of humanity's deadliest cataclysm, the ultimate tragedy is that so many people don't know, or don't want to know what is happening. As the HIV virus sweeps mercilessly through these lands, the fiercest trial Africa has yet endured, a few try to address the terrible depredation. The rest of society looks away. Flesh and muscle melt from the bones of the sick in packed hospital wards and lonely bush kraals. Corpses stack up in morgues until those on top crush the identity from the faces underneath. Raw earth mounds scar the landscape, grave after grave without name or number. Bereft children grieve for parents lost in their prime, for siblings scattered to the winds (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). The victims don't cry out. Doctors and obituaries do not give the killer its name. Families recoil in shame. Leaders shirk responsibility. The stubborn silence heralds victory for the disease: denial cannot keep the virus at bay (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). The developed world is largely silent too. AIDS in Africa has never commanded the full-bore response the West has brought to other, sometimes lesser, travails. We pay sporadic attention, turning on the spotlight when an international conference occurs, then turning it off. Good-hearted donors donate; governments acknowledge that more needs to be done. But think how different the effort would be if what is happening here were happening in the West (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). AIDS in Africa bears little resemblance to the American epidemic, limited to specific high-risk groups and brought under control through intensive education, vigorous political action and expensive drug therapy. Here the disease has bred a Darwinian perversion. Society's fittest, not its frailest, are the ones who die — adults spirited away, leaving the old and the children behind. You cannot define risk groups: everyone who is sexually active is at risk. Babies too, unwittingly infected by mothers. Barely a single family remains untouched. Most do not know how or when they caught the virus, many never know they have it, many who do know don't tell anyone as they lie dying. Africa can provide no treatment for those with AIDS (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). They will all die, of tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis, diarrhea, whatever overcomes their ruined immune systems first. And the statistics, grim as they are, may be too low. There is no broad-scale AIDS testing: infection rates are calculated mainly from the presence of HIV in pregnant women. Death certificates in these countries do not record AIDS as the cause. "Whatever stats we have are not reliable," warns Mary Crewe of the University of Pretoria's Center for the Study of AIDS. "Everybody's guessing," (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). Ignorance is the crucial reason the epidemic has run out of control. Surveys say many Africans here are becoming aware there is a sexually transmitted disease called AIDS that is incurable. But they don't think the risk applies to them. And their vague knowledge does not translate into changes in their sexual behavior. It's easy to see why so many don't yet sense the danger when few talk openly about the disease. And Africans are beset by so plentiful a roster of perils, famine, war, the violence of desperation or ethnic hatred, the regular illnesses of poverty, the dangers inside mines or on the roads that the delayed risk of AIDS ranks low (Time: Death Stalks a Continent 2001). Unlike African Americans, where information and medical treatment is readily available even to those with little or no money, these accommodations are not supplied to Africans. So, what type of treatment are they receiving and where are they getting their information? Few Africans can afford the drugs needed to fight AIDS, which can cost between $500 and $1,000 a month. Additionally, many African governments do not have the funds to import these drugs. The average African nation spends less than $10 per person each year on health care. At the same time, these governments have to fight diseases like malaria, TB, and cholera among others. Even simple antibiotics prescribed to patients who begin to show signs of so-called opportunistic AIDS infections, like tuberculosis and other bacterial infections, are not available for patients in many African countries. Another drug, Fluconazole, which is essential in the management of HIV-complications, is too expensive and therefore unavailable in many Sub-Saharan African countries (The Politics of AIDS Drugs in Africa 2003). This means that a majority of the...