Is it time to consider drastic measures now that AIDS is ravaging sub-Saharan Africa? Or should we just let the disease run its course naturally?
The Aids pandemic is ravaging countries in sub-Saharan Africa, drastically reducing life expectancy in some parts to less than 33 years, a new UN report said yesterday.The devastating impact of the crisis can be seen most clearly in seven African countries, including Malawi and Mozambique, where babies born in 2002 are not expected to live past 40 years because of the prevalence of HIV. Children in Zambia, where 17 per cent of the population are infected with the virus, are predicted to live just 32 years. The seven countries have, between them, seen an average drop in life expectancy of 13.5 years since 1990, the UN human development report said.
If people with AIDS won't stop spreading it, do more forceful methods need to be employed to protect those who aren't yet infected?
With almost a quarter of its population infected with the virus, Zimbabwe has been the country most dramatically affected. Life expectancy there has plummeted from 57 years in 1990 to 34 in 2002.In Swaziland, where one in three people between the ages of 15 and 49 are Aids sufferers, life expectancy has dropped by almost 20 years, and in Botswana, where the disease affects 37 per cent of the population, people can expect to live 16 years less now than in 1970.
It's terrible, and AIDS is more deadly than Saddam or Hitler were. Just because the killers kill with a disease rather than a gun doesn't make them any less guilty, does it? Or is ignorance a perfect excuse? At some point doesn't the right of self-defense kick in even against an unwitting murderer?
From what I've read, the reason the AIDS problem is so prevalant in Africa is because the standard of health is already so low that it is much easier to spread it there than in countries like the US.
For instance, in the US, (despite the doomsday prophecies of certain people) AIDS rarely affects people who aren't homosexuals or intravenous drug users because those are the only people who regularly exchange bodily fluids that have the opportunity to get into the recipients blood stream. Certainly there are exceptions, but this is the general rule.
In Africa there's all sorts of other factors, like villiages sharing needles for the purposes of innoculation and people with open sores in close contact with others.
Therefore, while the spread of AIDS in the US is generally due to risks taken by people who know better (which includes both the people who spread it and the people who get it), in Africa it is closer to a plague where chance rather than personal responsibility plays the major role in the spread of the disease.
So in Africa, a permanant quarintine would probably be more effective, but the recipients would be less deserving. Frankly, I don't think it would even be worth it to quarantine American AIDS patients. I personally am more worried about being hit by a car than getting AIDS.
However, if Africa had the resources to do something like that, (ignoring at the moment whether such a thing would be moral or not), they would probably already have a better standard of health.
My word, raising the specter of concentration camps for aids carriers...what a brave thing to say out loud. It may be the only immediate band-aid solution to an incredibly voracious epidemic.
A temporary fix, of course. Get real health initiatives in place. Sanitization procedures, public health procedures, as we have here in the West. Training, education, barrier protection; but it seems really important to shut down the intentional spreaders of the disease, by force if necessary, and slow the rate of infection as soon as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, many will see this as a violation of human rights. The right of the infected to spread a deadly contagion will trump the right of the uninfected portion of the population to safely remain that way.
Such is the thinking of the wacky world we live in today.