Response to Iliffe, Barnett and Whiteside 9/23

John Iliffe takes an interesting point of view in his book. As an historian and not an epidemiologist or medical doctor, his perspective is unique and important especially when it comes to a virus that has had such a profound impact on human history in all aspects for the last three decades. I was especially interested in the his attempt to date the history of the virus itself based on several accounts from different researchers and doctors since the 1950's. Ever since I learned about the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the United State in the 1980s I always wondered where and how it eventually arrived here especially since it is said to have jumped into the human species from chimpazees in western Africa. In common and general literature, people only talk about HIV/AIDS beginning in 1980 when the first American cases were reported. It seems like it does not occur to some writers to include a history of the viruses travels before it reached the United States. Sometimes, as is evident in many other examples of diseases, people in developed countries only start to worry about a disease when it reaches their mainland, regardless of how many people it has infected or killed in other less "important" countries. Iliffe somewhat hints at this idea but I strongly express it; one classic example is the smallpox eradication program which was launched mostly to ensure that no cases would be imported into the Western world which had by then eradicated the disease on its mainland. Barnett and Whiteside are perfectly on point when they say that the most important step before even beginning to fight this epidemic is to first realize that "welfare is a global common good" because AIDS is an "epidemic of globalisation" which has "spread rapidly because of the massive acceleration of communication, the rapidity with which desire is reconstructed and marketed globally and the flagrant inequality that exists within and between societies" (4). In this manner, AIDS has united the world in a way that probably would have not been possible otherwise. Now, when people aspire to find a while to stop this pandemic, it is not because they are afraid that it is going to be imported into their country but because they realize that the turmoil and destruction it causes in third world countries ultimately affects everyone in some way or another; others just can't stand to see people suffering so much. Yet others, especially government leaders and policy makers refuse to recognize the wide range of impacts that AIDS has. Most people who aspire to stop the epidemic are not policy makers or government leaders, because these people in charge, who are supposed to be the ones people turn to have continually disappointed their citizens so much that the able citizens have taken the matter into their own hands. There are alot of efforts in process right now to fight AIDS but most of them are undertaken not necessarily with willing governments if any at all. But these leaders must realize that unless they learn to accept wide range of impacts AIDS has had and will continue to have on all aspects of society and attack it with the right weapons for each aspect, the disease will continue to spread and if it eventually dies out, it will not have been because of us.