Mark S
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Mr. Moody – Freshman Topics W. Geography
Fourth Period

Questions to Death Stalks a Continent
1)	In Africa, there is a great ignorance towards HIV/AIDS, which impedes on medicinal development and controlling the epidemic. The three main ignorance’s and set-backs are people’s denial, lack of knowledge, and shame/taboo (not wanting or being able to talk openly about it).

2)	According to Mary Crewe, the common perception of those who are infected with HIV/AIDS is that the person infected seems to think they did something wrong and others deem them as living an “immoral life”. A big set-back for Africans is that it is taboo for them to speak of sexual actions, and therefore schools and clinics cannot openly educate people, and if they try, it is not accepted.

3)	Many men work in the truck-driving industry. This helps spread the epidemic, making it more widespread and prominent. What happens is because many men are truck drivers and therefore have to move around geographically a lot, they have sex with prostitutes along the way, and if the man is infected with AIDS, they infect everyone they “encounter”. This brings the deadly virus to remote places where AIDS has not yet affected people, but now it will.

4)	Men in Africa are very resistant to condoms, and society in general is ignorant towards all kinds of contraception. Men seem to think it is not very masculine to protect themselves, and many times, they do not understand the benefits of having protected sex for the health-benefits of their partner and/or themselves.

Questions to The Fidelity Fix
1)	Basically, fidelity is defined as “the faithful performance of a specific duty.” In this article, the author will ask the question, why is faithfulness and one’s belief not part of the fight against AIDS.
2)	In 1990, HIV/AIDS infections in Uganda dramatically decreased. This rapid fall was mainly because teenagers (both girls and boys) started to show abstinence. The choice of abstinence on the young male’s part played a much bigger factor of the decline in Uganda.
3)	According to Rachel Jewkes, an epidemiologist working with South Africa and their HIV/AIDS epidemic believes that gender relations “are in a very bad state”. This plays a factor in the amount of new infections. Because of so many men, even a women’s husband/boyfriend have AIDS, the women does not want to be infected, but because of cultural taboo’s and males’ resistance towards protection, such infections will occur. Educating and convincing the male population those women are important and have rights too, will greatly help reduce the increase of which the virus is growing.
4)	In Africa, for the sake of controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic, long term concurrencies are much better than “one night stands”. When a person is infected, it is much easier for him/her to infect others, while on the other hand, someone who has been infected for a while, is less likely to transmit it to another person. Thus, if people engage in long-term relationships, HIV/AIDS will not spread as quickly.
5)	"Transactional sex" is a sexual relationship in which women expect gifts of cash or consumer goods from boyfriends. These are becoming much more common because not only do poor young women want or need such gifts, but mainly that the gifts have enormous symbolic values.
6)	In Uganda, before AIDS became a crisis, international health agencies were largely dedicated to distributing health-related commodities, including vaccines, antibiotics and contraceptives, in poor countries all over the world. Uganda decided to embrace this idea. South Africa, however, were the complete opposite. They even raised the question of if HIV actually caused AIDS. Outside experts struggled to get policymakers to care about the crisis at all unlike in Uganda where the government embraced the help immediately. This could account for the success of AIDS prevention because a country where AIDS is shown as a killer disease and large measures are enforced has a much better chance than a country that openly questions whether there is a connection between HIV and AIDS.
7)	Nkululeko Nxesi is the former head of the Johannesburg-based National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS. He believes that it is a good idea to encourage monogamy along the lines of Uganda's Zero Grazing program as long as it was one of a great range of prevention programs: including condoms, HIV testing centers, and more. He says that even encouraging serial faithfulness as practiced in Western countries may make a difference. According to him, the problem is the destabilization of the southern African family by the upheavals of apartheid and migrant labor system.