Health officials call for prevention on World AIDS Day

By Hannah Sussman
Collegian Reporter
December 6, 2006

Dec. 1 marked World AIDS Day, with leading health experts bringing attention to the need for more aggressive strategies to battle the epidemic.

In China, taxicab drivers handed out literature on AIDS to educate the public. China has appeared to understand the severity of the disease and is making drastic changes to prevent recurring outbreaks of this deadly virus. In China alone the number of people who have contracted AIDS has increased by 30 percent since 2002.

However, other countries have not been as successful. Although more work is being done to combat the AIDS crisis, the problem has only gotten worse over the years, with four million new cases of HIV each year.

Public health experts say that until a cure for the virus is discovered, the key to minimizing the problem is prevention. Some experts have pointed to the strong correlation between abusive relationships and HIV transmission as a key to making small improvements.

“If you address the broader risk environment, women and communities can be quite creative in finding solutions,” said Dr. Julia Kim, one of the authors of a study being done by a British medical journal, The Lancet.

In the study, women who were loaned money to start a small business became less likely to remain in an abusive relationship as a result of their financial independence. In turn, the freedom from an abusive partner will decrease the likelihood of AIDS being transmitted.

“We need to run faster to get ahead of the virus,” said Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The World Health Organization set a goal to treat three million people with antiretrovirals by 2005, called the “3 By 5” strategy, but did not succeed. Dr. Jim Yong Kim, an AIDS expert at Harvard University, attributes some of these failures to the tendency of some health officials to spend too much time strategizing and not enough time putting plans into action.

“While officials work on a process of getting consensus and no one is held accountablepoor people die,” he said.

sussmanh1@lasalle.edu