Gnassingbe Ogunyemi Aide to Foreign Minister

I bring important concerns.   Important people and groups did not like the original UN Declaration on HIV/AIDS because it targeted homosexuals and prostitutes and drug users as the at-risk and as the transmitters.  The Vatican and Organization of Islamic Countries abhor activities they regard as immoral.  Both the  56-member Islamic faction  threatened to vote against the declaration and use its collective might to force its Third World trading partners to follow suit if the references to the groups were retained.  The Vatican also insisted on "sanitizing" the document.  Australia said the deletion gutted the document. 

The document was sanitized.  The Vatican and OIC  will not support  treatment of any kind for gays, prostitutes and drug users.  That means Catholic missionary hospitals and charities, Red Crescent, other Islamic medical and charitable  organizations refuse to treat these people.  They will only treat the "pure" but infected.  The US will not fund any group that advises, educates, or promotes family planning, condom use, or abortion. 

There is parallel for this distinction  in the Western world.  Hemophiliacs and other innocent victims infected by blood transfusions received handsome payments from the governments of Japan, Canada, France, the US, etc., etc.  Not a dime for gays or drug users.   Back in the 1930's, private hospitals in America refused to admit and treat people with gonorrhea.  (That's one reason the US had to set up public hospitals.) 

Our government is concerned that if we treat these  pariahs, then  charitable and church groups--and governments--will cut their funding and no longer support  us.  Any plan we come up with will probably have to specify just who we plan to treat.    I think we should use scarce drugs for "good" people who were innocently infected.  Men who went to prostitutes can be treated--they were acting according to our custom.  Prostitutes should not; women should be chaste.  People should not use intravenous drugs, so we should not treat them.  And homosexuality is, as our leader said, a "scourge."     

Moses Mubanda,  Health Ministry

Alfred Mboysha, Minister of Development

Peace Eyadema, Minister of Social Services

Archer Bokambo, Finance Ministry in African state