AIDS: THE FIGHT AGAINST DISCRIMINATION
25 years after the disease was first diagnosed in 1981, the number of people all over the world living with HIV in 2005 was 40 million. In spite of recent improvements in access to antiretroviral therapy and the generalisation of prevention campaigns, last year over 3 million people died from this epidemic, half a million of which were children. The World Health Organisation warns that we are currently at the highest peak of incidence, with 5 million new infections last year.
As the disease has spread, antiretroviral therapies have considerably improved the quality of life of those people carrying HIV, increasing their life expectancy. Science has also succeeded in enabling a couple with one HIV positive member to have healthy children by washing the semen or avoiding contact between the foetus' blood and the mother's.
However, the most worrying detail is that only 1.5% of the patients who need antiretroviral therapy have access to it. Medicine is widespread among the HIV positive population in more developed countries and, despite having reached 80% of affected people in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba, in Asia only one in seven patients received medication by mid-2005 and in Africa the figure scarcely reached one in ten.
Together with the universalisation of treatment, that the UN intends to reach by 2010, and the globalisation of prevention campaigns as the only possible measures against HIV/AIDS, the WHO faces a new problem. Due to a lack of awareness and knowledge about HIV, a stigma has arisen around the infection that often fosters the need to create a scapegoat to blame for the disease. In some countries among the homosexual collective, and in certain parts of Africa, the idea has been spread that the condom distributed by the whites is what is causing the infection.
Stigma emerges out of fear and relating AIDS to sexual relationships, death and conduct considered to be prohibited or taboo in many parts of the world, such as sex before marriage and extramarital sex, prostitution, homosexuality or the use of intravenous drugs. Ignorance marginalises and, in many cases, dissuades people living with HIV from playing a vital, front-line role in prevention efforts.
The latest UNAIDS/WHO report stresses that a comprehensive response to the disease requires the simultaneous acceleration of the treatment and prevention efforts on a global scale. In any case, any initiative designed to control the expansion of HIV must, as indicated by the WHO, be more determined in facing the factors that foster the epidemic, including stigma, discrimination, sexual inequality and other human rights violations.