By Nicholas RAINER

The national policy on HIV/Aids is unsettlingly contradictory. Indeed, Mauritius, as the leader of the opposition rightly pointed out last week, is one of only two African countries to offer free anti-retroviral treatment to HIV/Aids sufferers. Yet, successive governments have dragged their feet (to say the very least) on the issue of attacking the epidemic on the most effective front, that of prevention. It?s rather like telling people to jump out of an airplane without parachutes, whilst at the same time promising to take them to hospital once they?ve crash-landed.

This political cowardice of not supplying clean syringes to heroin addicts and not distributing condoms by the truckload will become painfully evident when the epidemic reaches its true proportions, which will be nothing short of apocalyptic. Heroin addiction is spreading like wildfire and the gravest epidemic in history is hitching a free ride on its back.

By continuously cracking down on drug users (and not necessarily the barons that feed their habits), government is committing a mistake much akin to the one made by the Bush administration after the double attack on the World Trade Center. Instead of analyzing the origins of the disaster, the Americans embarked on repressive crusades in Afghanistan and Iraq from which they are unsuccessfully trying to extricate themselves. Ask the wrong questions, you see, and you?ll get the wrong answers.

I would like to think that government would react appropriately to an outbreak of, say, cholera. Unfortunately, HIV/Aids does not enjoy the same consideration as it associated with two social phenomena that are still taboo: drug use and promiscuous sex. By choosing to bury their heads in the sand of blissful ignorance, the decision-makers are guilty of gross professional misconduct. If they want to act like ostriches, they must accept that those big birds have brains the size of a garden pea.

Not only is HIV/Aids incurable, but it can also be transmitted to future generations. In turn, the economic costs in terms of anti-retroviral drugs and GDP loss will be unwelcome additions to an already bloated budget deficit. Brazil, on the other hand, was able to save millions of dollars by offering regular supplies of clean needles to drug users and by making prostitutes the targets of campaigns promoting condom use

The urgency of the matter should transcend petty party politics and the pernicious pressure of religious groups. Awareness campaigns, like the excellent one recently organized by PILS, are of limited efficiency if not accompanied by a holistic and coherent national policy.

Sadly, a junkie in need of a fix wouldn?t think twice of plunging a dirty needle into his/her veins. Even if warned beforehand that, by doing so, he/she would contract HIV/Aids. And you are wrong if you think that your family is safe from this threat. The scourge of heroin addiction affects all levels of society ? rich and poor, educated and illiterate - indiscriminately.

Neil Young sang, ?Every junkie?s like a setting sun.? This is all the more true now that HIV/Aids has added its presence to the predicament. If there is one area where lasting ?changement? is needed, it?s in the way we deal with the realities of the HIV/Aids epidemic.