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Can this dream come true ?
The great unpredictability of the last twenty years is both the most magnificent charm of modernity and its greatest terror. The group of seven top industrial countries’ leaders are seriously thinking about adjusting currencies to help rebalance the world economy. The never-ending list of luxury stores opening in China makes it seen as if the streets are now paved with platinum. And yet the rising giant is not sleeping on its laurels.
China is aware that Aids is one of the formidable challenges to human life and dignity. Five million people are victims of HIV each year. Dr Seth Berkley, director of the International Aids vaccine initiative, said, “If we don’t get serious about prevention, the demand for drugs will drown us.”
<B>A sense of togetherness</B>
Humanity has failed miserably in understanding the real meaning of sex. Sex is the safest and most sacred meaning of love between a man and a woman who feel the need for each other in leading life with a sense of togetherness, understanding, communication and sharing good times as well as bad times in the most responsible and loving manner.
Understandably enough, dysfunctional marriage relationships, dizzying rise in divorce, broken homes and zigzagging family ties are causing anxiety, fury and scepticism. An alarmist mentality is extending its firm grip in both urban as well as rural areas.
As the loving, pacifying and uniting power of sex is weakening, the killing power of sex is on the rise. Worldwide, some 3 million people are now dying of Aids and 90 percent of them in developing countries. Gonorrhoea and syphilis to herpes and human papillomavirus are escalating to breath-taking heights.
Legalising gay marriages is neither a short-term nor a long-term solution for gay men. Shigella, giardiasis and amebiasis are hitting hard on their immune system. They are dying of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, as recently shown by surveys. Of course, there are exceptions. However, what relief can a few have on the suffering multitude?
Aids is not a plague for sex workers and gays only. A protected sex worker runs less risk in many cases than an unprotected stay-at-home mom or a faithful hubby. A careless mom or dad with extra-marital affairs is bringing Aids in the home where the meaning of fidelity has been diluted. Where there is fidelity, there is no place for fear, not even the use of condoms, unless family planning pops in.
Shark-filled aquarium</B>
The developed world may go for vanity projects like shark-filled aquarium but simultaneously, they can’t be blind and deaf to Lesotho where a third of its adults are living with Aids. No doubt, in 2002, five countries came together to create the Global Fund to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. However, research has shown that only 20 percent of the people who need drugs have access to them. This is where the developed countries have to push harder to prevent 8,000 people from dying everyday. Aids education is desperately failing somewhere with the number of needle users, haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients falling sick, withering and dying.
China is one of the 23 nations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe where Bill Clinton’s foundation has been invited to work to help build care, treatment and prevention programs. Now, the big question is – are we doing enough to combat Aids in Mauritius?
We talk so much about so many things at the same time and yet we talk so little about Aids. It is urgent that we set up a genuine National Aids Control Organisation whose mission statement will be “to control and combat Aids, to safeguard the interests of Aids victims with due respect for their dignity and make of Mauritius an Aids-free island in the next quarter of a century”.
The need for training a new generation of doctors and nurses to handle the Aids crisis has long been felt. This team will be today’s beacon of hope and tomorrow’s saviour. Working under conditions of high risk, they need to be remunerated accordingly coupled with a state funded insurance policy.
Antiretroviral therapy centres (ART) must be immediately opened providing the right equipment, the CDU testing, the HIV testing and importantly enough, the counselling. The team responsible for counselling must reach all schools and colleges of the island. If we want a change at the level of the nation, the starting point is the younger generation.
Socio-cultural organisations, religious groups, priests, pundits, maulanahs must all make a concerted effort to curb Aids and its damage, before we all fall down into a bottomless quicksand. People do listen to them and pay respect to their guidelines.
Training must not be limited to medical staff only. Teachers, welfare officers, social workers and voluntary club members are all links of the same chain. The state has to identify its motives, using focal points to show its leadership skills. We are definitely running out of time. Let’s not wait for everything to be topsy-turvy. This is not the time to drink tea and eat biscuits leisurely, to be scrupulously honest. Before another storm is forecast, we have to be ready. Simply flapping our wings will not stop it.
It would be very much appreciated if the wives of our ministers extended a helping hand in this crusade for a better Mauritius. This will bring a contagious effect for Aids is not the business of its victims and their relatives only; it is the business of one and all. This bout of concern will be targeted to other vulnerable groups in the future. The present urgency is to avert this humanitarian disaster in our island.
Just like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is combating the Aids disaster, we make an earnest appeal to our Prime minister and his compassionate wife to set up a similar foundation to bring rescue to the Aids crisis. The whole Mauritian nation will be behind them. Can this dream come true?
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