I remember when HIV/AIDS was the biggest topic to talk about. I remember when there was no medicine to even control the rate of the disease and that once you received HIV you were don for. With medicine now becoming so advance that it can stop the rate in which AIDS will kill you the topic is becoming more and more in control. I do still see HIV/AIDS as an important and deadly disease but I now think it is time to focus on other uncontrollable disease. In an article in Yahoo the doctor explain that more children are killed by pneumonia than AIDS. The article goes on detail to explain that we are now wasting and prioritizing AIDS funding that we are forgetting other deadly disease and sickness. I believe this is true. Even though I know AIDS is horrible we are now finding ways to control it as I stated before. People are living longer with the disease. Now that we have a foot at the door we should keep moving forward but not with so much force. I think we should have enough research and funding for the disease but not 47 million dollars. Let’s try to cut that in ¾. With other killing machines such as malaria and pneumonia what attention are they going to receive? I have heard this year of so many people dying because they had pneumonia. Something so common is now becoming complex and hard to control and monitor. If we do need to focus on AIDS let focus on help we need in Africa, such as proper cheap medicine and enough medical help. That seems to not be there. Besides that I think we need to back off a little. I know a lot of people will disagree but we need help in other forms of illness and diseases.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_med_challenging_aids
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5 comments:
I think it's slightly ironic that you've posted this on the eve of World AIDS Day.
But in Africa, so many people are HIV positive and don't know it. And if they do, they don't know what it is or how it's spread.
And some places, like South Africa, AIDS denialism has strengthened ignorance, so people don't see the risk that their HIV will develop into AIDS.
It's an issue that is killing millions every day, both in the US and abroad. It's everywhere. So I don't think it's fair to say that it's getting "too much attention." In fact, I don't think it's getting enough. AIDS education is vital, especially in places like Africa.
The Theatre and Social Change class is performing an educational piece about AIDS called "Walking Red Ribbons" tomorrow in the experimental theatre at 7. It'd be great if people came and saw it!
Imagine how the world would be today if people stopped as soon as they got "a foot in the door" as you say. Nothing would ever get done; we'd be in a constant state of "Eh, it's good enough!". If you don't keep working at it, your "foot in the door" will get caught when the door closes.
I think both commenters are too quick to disagree with Alysi without really examining the point which she is making. She is not saying that AIDs is not a scourge, she is merely suggesting that if the goal is to fight illness and death among the impoverished then there may be better ways to spend the money the UN has allocated to fight AIDS. If "pneumonia....kills more children every year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined" and eminently avoidable things like diarrhea still remain a problem, it would seem nothing but common sense to reexamine how aid money is spent. This is particularly true if one considers how much, I assume, cheaper it is per child to prevent diarrhea and pneumonia then the cost per child of measures used against AIDs.
I understand that pneumonia and malaria are big problems, and I agree that they deserve more attention. But this doesn't mean that we should shift focus away from AIDS.
And clearly, the $47 million spent on AIDS isn't getting the job done. According to this report (http://www.worldvision.org/aoa.nsf/0783167f5da26bf6872570a200775036/50261b964f95a183882570bb006ca525/$FILE/HIVAIDS%20Statistics.pdf), 25 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are living with HIV or AIDS. And 14,000 are infected every single day.
I don't understand how you could say ANYTHING this big or destructive is getting "too much attention."
I am not trying to say to walk away from this, but like Alex stated we are having commmon sickness such as pneumonia killing more children than AIDS. But yet we do not give it the same amount of attetion and care and it is becoming something deadly.
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