entertainment.timesonline.co.uk — Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani says political correctness over criticising sexual practices such as multiple partners in Africa has prevented us finding an effective strategy to fight HIV.
May 5, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountMay 18, 2008
'HIV is largely a sexually transmitted infection, so there must be something different about sex in Africa. Yet you can?t say that without appearing to be racist. So campaigners have come up with other reasons that HIV is worse in Africa: poverty, ignorance, men having more power than women. All politically correct, but not epidemiologically correct.The truth is that a society in which many people have two or three partners on the go at any one time will produce a bigger epidemic than a society where people may have 10 partners in five years, but only one at a time. And it?s a fact that in parts of Africa, it?s more common for both men and women to have two or three simultaneous relationships than to have serial partners. Do people behave in this way because they are poor and ignorant? Not in Bangladesh, or Bolivia, or dozens of other countries where incomes and literacy are low. Indeed, in Africa, the incidence of HIV infection is highest in the richest households and the richest countries.In east Africa, HIV spread first among people who had lots of partners ? in other words, men and women who traded sex for money or favours. Had condom use in commercial sex been pushed to very high levels at the time ? as happened in Thailand ? the epidemic would have been contained.' I think this is very bold. The media focus here in the US on Africa has been on blaming Europeans and European Americans for Africans' troubles, including AIDS, as if AIDS and African promiscuity were simply a by-product of colonization that only seems to affect Africans. The truth is that colonization didn't hurt Africa; colonization moved Africa into the modern age, but African promptly collapsed into chaos following the end of colonization, and the African AIDS crisis is a cultural element of African tribalism, not the fault of any other people. The truth isn't good for the global collectivist ideology that underlies the reporting on Africa, but pretending that whites are more racist than other groups, and that AIDS was caused by and continues to occur because of that racism is a fraud.