The past week saw an important topic that shouldn't have been tabled come alive again. Earlier this month the health department of the District of Columbia issued an updated report on the severity of HIV/AIDS infection within the district, finding over 3 percent of the population was infected, with many local health experts putting the number closer to 5 percent due to underreporting. The report concluded that Washington, D.C., is in the ""middle of a modern HIV/AIDS epidemic."" The 3 percent figure meets the United Nations threshold of an official epidemic, or 1 percent of a whole population of a specific geographic area.
In addition to this report, Pope Benedict XVI, currently in Africa on a weeklong trip, claimed that the Roman Catholic Church is at the forefront of solving the AIDS epidemic, declaring, ""You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem."" He said instead that a proper moral and responsible attitude is the best way to fight the spread of AIDS. Today, over 22 million Africans are infected with the virus, constituting two-thirds of the total world population of AIDS. In 2007, Africa accounted for 75 percent of worldwide AIDS deaths. Africa is also the largest-growing region for the Catholic faith. Oxford University professor of immunology Quentin Sattentau decried, ""My reaction is that this represents a major step backwards in terms of global health education, is entirely counterproductive and is likely to lead to increases in HIV infection in Africa and elsewhere.""
This summer, the Center for Disease Control issued a study showing that the United States had underreported new annual cases of HIV infection by 40 percent. Since 2002, according to U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-D.C., ""the CDC's prevention budget has actually shrunk by 19 percent,"" though AIDS relief in Africa amounted to tens of billions of dollars and abstinence-only programs received over $10 billion. Like so many other problems, HIV/AIDS prevention has become a Washington ideological issue and not an issue of social justice.
The findings confirm what is all too common a theme with problems that affect the citizens. In the United States, politicians take positions on issues not based on acknowledging a problem and trying to become part of the solution, but instead on ideological and partisan grounds. They do it not because they are looking out for the public's best interest, but because they want a 10-second talking point in the next election. Here are some current U.S. AIDS statistics: 53 percent of all new infections affect gay and bisexual men, and infection rates for blacks are seven times higher than for whites and almost three times higher for Hispanics.
A study published by the Black AIDS Institute and funded by the Ford Foundation stated that if U.S. African Americans were a nation unto themselves, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the HIV/AIDS virus. Their death rate is two and a half times that of whites, and as a whole, this hypothetical nation's life expectancy would be 105th, behind citizens living in the Gaza Strip.
If that is not damning enough, the report also included data concluding that more black Americans were living with the AIDS virus than in seven of the 15 countries that received support from former president Bush's anti-AIDS program (Botswana, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Namibia, Rwanda and Vietnam).
Clearly, we have an AIDS problem in the U.S. Politicians and citizens alike have behaved as if HIV/AIDS were a thing of the past and that it only affected people of those other nations. It is not. The great scare came in the late 1980s when around 130,000 people annually became infected. We became concerned. By the early 1990s, through education and prevention methods, annual infection rates lowered and stabilized to around 50,000. Since then, we deluded ourselves into thinking the problem was contained, that it wasn't spreading. Well, it hasn't decreased either. After the latest CDC report that ""underreported"" numbers, infection rates have stayed more or less constant since. Every year, 50-60,000 more become infected.
We still have an AIDS problem, it just happens to affect the less desirable, the less powerful, the less noticeable. We now have an AIDS epidemic in our nation's capital. We made the commitment to help Africa and other parts of the world with their HIV/AIDS epidemic. We began distributing condoms. We began needle exchanges. We began educating on prevention. We have become part of the solution in those other nations. We need to take on the challenges that we took on before to help other nations battle this horrific virus, not because they are politically beneficial or ideological, but because they are necessary parts of the solution in the United States as well.
Joseph Koss is a junior majoring in secondary education in social studies. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
