You
are both suggesting an urban-centered policy, that targets elites and men.
Look, we have a serious problem of
food
production.
It’s the women and children in rural areas that grow most of the
food. The old folks are too old
to raise crops; the kids are too
young, and they’re sick. Men
work on export-crops, or go to the mines, or cities.
On
the one hand, the men in cities and mines have sex with prostitutes in
town, then return and gave HIV to their wives.
Babies were borne with HIV. Nursing
mothers decline and die more quickly.
On
the other hand, the men who went away sometimes didn't send money. The
wife entered prostitution to care for the kids. Women are scared
to tell their husbands they have HIV/AIDS--they fear abandonment and/or
mistreatment.
Unless
we take care of rural women, we’re
going to have famines, not necessarily this year but in coming years.
Why don’t we divide the free drugs so
that half go to the villages, predominantly for women, and half to urban
areas—and you decide who is essential there.
What
any proposal to the Global UN Fund should include are
-
Drugs
for AIDS, malaria, and TB
-
Range
Rovers to make regular weekly tours around villages to give drugs-- and to
counsel them about the side effects.
-
A program to train and expand nurses for the
program.
-
Reliable and inexpensive test
kits so that we don't give scarce drugs to the wrong people. That means
we import the test kits from India that accurately test for multiple strains
of HIV; the US kits only test for HIV-1b. We need to be able to do tests
every 6 months.
-
Expand labs and hire people to keep records.
We
know that if we give a drug just before a woman gives birth, and to the baby a
week later, that the HIV load will drop.
We don’t know how long that will last.
Let’s
make a concentrated effort to get separate funding from the outside to test
and treat every pregnant woman in hospitals and then to the baby.
Most of the hospitals are in urban areas, so that will take care of a
large group of women. There
is NO EXCUSE for not treating pregnant women and their babies.
