I have been told, by AIDS activists that Universal Precautions prevent health care professionals from getting AIDS (which justifies the activists’ opposition to AIDS testing) and few children get it from their parents.Be that as it may, the primary method of AIDS transmission is via illicit sex – usually homosexual acts, or women having sex with promiscuous bi-sexual men. Second to that is intravenous drug users with infected needles.If we can solve these two problems, we can prevent most AIDS.The solution to both is for those in the at-risk groups to change their behavior.
I am not sure if you want to pass on false information, or if you are simply making it up. Universal Precautions are necessary to help prevent transmission of the virus to health workers, social workers, teachers and other professionals who are working with those who are or may be HIV+.
Similarly, rugby, hockey, football and soccer matches are monitored (blood pool) to make sure that players and support staff know about Universal Precautions. They are not 100 per cent foolproof, but they ensure that transmission by blood contact is limited.
I have never, in 15 years of working professionally around the world on HIV, heard
any so-called activist deny the necessity of testing for HIV. Testing is the only way we can know the extent of the disaster we are facing, as individuals, communities, nations, and globally.
It is so bad that while previously no testing would be done unless accompanied by counselling, testing is done now without counselling if necessary. We have just completed a national HIV test for all teachers (400,000) in South Africa. Your information is false.
Behaviour change is important. But there are many different ways of getting HIV that do not involve illicit sex, as you call it, or that do not involve sex at all:
- newborns pick it up from their mothers as they move through the birth canal, or from the mother’s milk
- health care and social workers pick it up from patients and clients
- medics and paramedics pick it up from patients
- heterosexual males and females pick it up during heterosexual intercourse, especially when there is already a sexually transmitted infection present (as there is in poor communities)
- Chinese farmers pick it up when they sell their blood for money to buy fertiliser, when dirty equipment is used to take the bloods (15 m in one Chinese province, Yenan)
- African boys of initiation age pick it up when the same knife is used to circumcise a number of young men: if one is HIV+, then others will be at risk of infection
- Burmese, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese girls pick it up when they are sold into prostitution abroad by their parents - so they can spend about 10 years in the trade to make money to build a house and buy a motorbike and TV.
Asian anti-HIV programmes have focused on transmission by drug abusers (dirty needles), prostitutes (many clients), and homosexuals (risky unprotected sex). For some years, they were able to keep infection levels down in those groups. However, drug abusers, prostitutes and bisexuals all have sexual partners in the general population, and so the infection is now spreading rapidly there. Ordinary people like you and me.
Behaviour change will take decades: we are already 30 years into the pandemic. In the interim, we need humanitarian support to help people keep safe and healthy: clean water and sanitation, anti-retroviral drugs, enough of the right kind of food. We also need to help break down some of the obstacles that tradition places in the way of changing behaviour. People leave old customs behind only with difficulty.
This is clearly more than a two-bite issues: HIV is linked with poverty, lack of education, lack of food and clean water, homelessness, unemployment, traditional customs and behaviours, urban degradation and rural poverty, wars and civil commotion. It requires addressing on a number of fronts, and the Catholic Church - as any Christian community - has a responsibility which it is taking up, to challenge all the many factors that are linked to HIV infection and prevalence.