Do You Remember AIDS?

I first remember hearing about the AIDS pandemic when I was in elementary school in the mid-80s. During a conversation over dinner with my family one night, my dad was trying to teach me and my older sisters about AIDS (with what little information we had back then). He told us he heard that 1 in 3 people around the world would end up getting AIDS and dying from it. To illustrate the point for us he said, "so basically that means one of the three of you (me and my two sisters) will get it." I was too young I think to separate an illustration from reality, so I took the comment literally.

So from that day, I started paying a LOT of attention to news about the disease. The school I attended through 12th grade did a lot of AIDS education and I was increasingly surrounded with information about it. I even remember asking my parents in high school to donate the money they would spend on my Christmas presents to AIDS research, hoping for a cure. Then, I went to college-- UT-- and stopped hearing much about it. Stopped meeting people with the disease. I naively assumed it meant that the global AIDS pandemic had improved. I knew they hadn't found a cure, but had invented plenty of meds to fight it. I also assumed that because it appeared as though the U.S. had stopped having as many victims, that it must be the same across the world too. I am just beginning to understand how wrong my thinking was.

I am reading a book right now in preparation for my June trip to Ethiopia called "There Is No Me Without You" (by Melissa Fay Greene). It is the story of an Ethiopian woman who starts taking in and caring for children orphaned by the AIDS in her own country. The book weaves back and forth between this woman's story and the story of AIDS from its beginning up until now. Her personal story is tender and compassionate. But the story of AIDS is just making me plain mad, and broken for its victims.
"The numbers of AIDS deaths in the U.S. and Western Europe plummeted just as the numbers of AIDS deaths in Africa were exploding. With the falloff of mortality in the northern hemisphere, the public engagement with HIV/AIDS diminished. ... The wealthy nations lost interest, once they understood they had escaped the worst." (p. 190-191) No wonder I started hearing about AIDS less and less.

The author wrote a chapter about all the drug advancements that have been made, but about how few of them ever reach Africa. As for Ethiopia, "In 2004, a quarter million HIV-positive Ethiopians reached the critical stage of the disease requiring (drug) treatment to avert rapid deterioration and death. Only 4%-- 10,000 people-- had access to the medicine, which restored the lives of patients in wealthy countries." (p. 184) The rest were left to die. And "there would be no anti-AIDS drugs for children in Ethiopia until 2005." (p. 142) That is just 4 years ago!

She writes that most doctors (even as late as 2006, when the book was published) in Ethiopia are afraid to see patients they think might be sick with "the slim" (Ethiopia's slang reference to HIV/AIDS). They refuse to serve/treat them-- as though they had treatments to even offer. And they are scared to even touch them. The disease has slowly wiped out a generation and a half of parents. Leaving behind over a million orphans... some infected, some not yet.

As I read this book, I am realizing that I almost forgot about AIDS. But even in 2009, it is still VERY MUCH an issue in Africa, and our world. Even if we feel more insulated from it here in America. If Americans get it (which plenty still do), they can treat it. What happens to those outside America who get it and have ZERO options but to wait out their death, leaving behind children with no one to care for them?