The 17th International AIDS Conference, taking place this year in Mexico City, kicked off on Sunday August 3, 2008 with the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, officially welcoming around 22,000 delegates from 175 countries to the gathering. While Mr. Hinojosa's appearance makes a change from 2006 when Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper refused to attend the Conference taking place in his own country, it looks like nothing much else has changed from two years ago when it comes to actually dealing with the disease.
Of the 22,000 or so people who have shown up in Mexico City, one has to hope that they are all aware that HIV/AIDS can only be spread by an infected person sharing bodily fluids with an uninfected person. So in order to prevent the spread of the disease all you have to do is reduce the chances of that happening. Statistical evidence gathered over the past twenty years by organizations such as UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that making condoms available for sexually active people and supplying clean needles to intravenous drug users are the two most effective ways of preventing the disease from spreading, as those are the two most common ways the disease is spread. (Please see Elizabeth Pisani's reference page at her Wisdom Of Whores Web site for support documentation and statistics)
However, judging by the way things are shaping up at the conference, people are either reluctant to talk about the issue of prevention directly or, even worse, oppose the means of ensuring delivery of preventative measures. For example, instead of talking about condoms and needles, the latest refrain is "prevention by treatment". While it is of course inexcusable that only four million out of the thirty-three million people worldwide currently estimated to be infected with the disease are receiving treatment, arguing that ensuring everybody infected is treated will prevent the disease from spreading is a fallacy.
Although it is true that once a person is on the anti-viral medication used to prolong an AIDS sufferer's life expectancy they are less infectious, they can still transmit the disease and need to take the same precautions that anyone else does. The problem is that statistics are showing that once people start taking the medication they believe they aren't a threat anymore and stop taking preventative measures.
Other problems with this approach is, what do you do about people who are infected but don't know it? If you don't know you're infected with the virus you're not liable to be taking the anti-viral cocktail of medications required to fight the HIV/AIDS virus, are you? Now consider that in light of recent statistics that show one in five of homosexual men in New York City who test positive for the virus already have full-blown AIDS. Considering how long it takes to develop full-blown AIDS after you have contracted the HIV virus — sometimes ten years — it means these men have been infectious for that length of time without knowing.
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