By: Linzy Warkentin
As you read this, AIDS is taking lives in Sub-Saharan Africa, swallowing families, communities, and hopes. AIDS kills 6,000 people each day in Africa, more than wars, famines, and floods. Last year, AIDS killed 2.3 million adults and children, and 30 million people are currently infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. According to the U.N. 91 percent of the deaths occurred in 34 countries, 29 in sub-Sahara Africa.
The people living in Africa have to wake up in the morning and eat breakfast with their kids, some of whom may already be doomed to die from AIDS. Some of the people have spouses who live hundreds of miles away and they risk their life in every act of sexual intercourse. Some women have been accused of being whores when they ask to use a condom. Some people lay on the streets desperately sick without any way of getting to a doctor, or clinic, or medical help, or food. In places of work every third person is fatally ill. At the birthplace of humanity�s most deadly disease, the biggest tragedy is that so many people don�t know or don�t want to know what is happening.
There are drugs out there that extend the life of people living with AIDS. Wealthy countries use cocktails that are made up of multiple drugs to transform AIDS from a killer to a chronic disease and reduce its spread by making the infection less contagious. These people in Sub-Saharan Africa can also stop dying if they too had access to these drugs. The problem is so simple�there is not enough money to fight the disease.
The AIDS pandemic is also threatening the production of food in southern and eastern Africa. As adults become infected they are not able to plant or harvest crops. 60 percent of those with AIDS have reduced the number of crops they grow. The FAO predicts that by the year 2020 over 20% of their agricultural labor force will be lost to HIV/AIDS. The government estimates that over 600,000 children have already been orphaned by the disease. The FAO is testing ways to help them learn farming and other life skills.
Some people are calling Africa �the Orphaned Continent� because so many of the children are orphaned because of this killer disease. There are no drugs for the vast majority of Africans that are living with HIV/AIDS. If the US helps and gives money to Africa for their cocktails, how are we supposed to provide medicine for every single infected person on the continent? Even a simple education might be able to lower the number of people that get infected with AIDS. Some of the people who are infected don�t know how they got it or if there is a cure. Africa has been living with this epidemic from the very start and it still continues to this day.