AIDS in different parts of the world

When AIDS was first discovered and named in the early 1990s, it was named GRID, and thought of as primarily a gay man's disease. Soon it became clear that IV drug users were also included in the susceptible population. In The United States, AIDS is still seen as a disease afflicting primarily people engaging in marginalized risky behavior: people who share needles or have unprotected sex.

In Africa, where AIDS began to emerge as the great scourge of the twenty-first century, AIDS is a much more widespread phenomenon. Where in the US, HIV affects primarily the urban poor, in Africa the disease is not as socioeconomically particular. In Africa, AIDS is spread through what many see as normal behavior. Men with many concurrent sexual partners, some of whom might be sex workers, spread it to their wives, who then infect their children through breast milk. Because in some African cultures, monogamy is not considered the norm, these methods of transmission are harder to curb because there is no cultural stigma against these behaviors in and of themselves.

Lately, AIDS has begun to become endemic to a much larger degree in parts of Asia, which had previously remained largely unaffected by AIDS. The first chapter of Disease, Change, Consciousness and Denial asserted that "Asia will overtake sub-Saharan Africa in absolute numbers [of AIDS cases] before 2010." The reservoir for HIV in southeast Asia, in particular, has been sex workers and IV drug users, somewhat similar to the afflicted population in the United States. Yet while prevention strategies seem to be working n Africa, whose AIDS prevention campaign has a multimillion dollar budget, new cases of AIDS are steadily appearing in Cambodia and Thailand. Methods of prevention are largely ineffective and inadequate in this region, which has no structured prevention or treatment system in place. For example, in Thailand, 80% of gay men have never been tested for the virus, only half of female sex workers report regularly using a condom, and 35% of intravenous drug users use non-sterile injecting equipment.

AIDS in Asia is an emerging phenomenon that has the potential to reach Africa's proportions if a better healthcare safety net is not put in place as soon as possible to ensure that high risk populations do not disseminate the disease throughout the region. The cultural and geographic diversity of Asia would make it nearly impossible to develop a blanket strategy for curbing the spread.

Katie Nelson

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