Thursday, January 25, 2018

What if you stopped an epidemic, and nobody cared?

Bush Jr was the one behind PREPFAR, but few in the West know of the program, or how many lives it saved in Africa...this article notes millions of lives were saved.

From ScienceDaily.


Between its launch in 2003 and September 2017, PEPFAR-funded programs delivered antiretroviral therapy to more than 13.3 million men, women and children; voluntary medical male circumcision to reduce the risk of HIV acquisition to more than 15.2 million men; prenatal care that led to the prevention of 2.2 million perinatal HIV infections; and support for more than 6.4 million orphans and other vulnerable children impacted by HIV.

...In the commentary, the authors recount the circumstances in which PEPFAR was conceived more than 15 years ago. Research supported by the NIH and others had led to the development of antiretroviral drugs and treatment regimens that increased life expectancies among people diagnosed with HIV from years to decades, and drastically reduced AIDS deaths in resource-rich nations. However, millions of people in resource-limited nations continued to die without access to adequate therapy. Seeing an opportunity to reduce suffering, President George W. Bush established a program to share the benefits of these scientific breakthroughs and other HIV services to prevent infections and treat people in 14 nations with high rates of HIV infection...

The hospital where I had worked in Africa had such a clinic, and the public health sister I worked with had her clinic destroyed by Mugabe's "throw out the trash" program, that destroyed "illegal" houses in areas that voted against him.

I send one of the sisters I worked with there money for her nieces and nephew's school fees: Two of her brothers died of HIV related complications before the program started, and she just lost her niece who had a neonatal infection and was on treatment, but died of secondary infection shortly before she was due to start college.

Sigh.

It's not that Africans are more promiscuous: but men are men, and educated men often have multiple or serial mistresses (or as we call them here in the Philippines, "second wives") and the chain of disease spreads more quickly due to other customs, such as lack of circumcision and the use of Depo Provera or drying herbs used by women "down there".

the low rate of HIV in the Philippines vs the high rate in Thailand might be our custom of "tuli"... one proof that the Caliphate, not China, used to run the place.

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