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Africa: Activist Praises Europe, Slams U.S. on Aids
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INTERVIEW
24 April 2008
Posted to the web 24 April 2008
Cindy Shiner
Stephen Lewis is a renowned and vigorously outspoken Canadian diplomat who has worked extensively to reduce the impact of HIV/Aids in Africa and to advocate for those living with the disease.
Formerly the special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa for United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he is now chairman of the board of the Canada-based Stephen Lewis Foundation, which endeavors to ease the pain of HIV/Aids in Africa by funding grassroots projects. Lewis is also co-director of Aids-Free World, a new international Aids advocacy organization based in the United States.
In a wide-ranging interview with AllAfrica's Cindy Shiner, Lewis discussed current efforts to fight HIV/Aids and how Africans are coping. This is the second of a three-part series.
Do you feel the international community is doing enough now to address HIV/Aids in Africa?
No, they're not. It's much better than it was three to five years ago but the international community still is not galvanized enough in sufficient support of Africa to respond to the pandemic. If it were we would long ago have supplied much more help in the replenishment of the lost human resources… [and] in the repair of health infrastructures.
We would have years ago put in place the prevention of transmission from mother to child [of the virus] during the birthing process. We would have invested much more in the orphaned children. We still have millions of people in need of treatment. It's unlikely we will reach the goal of universal access to treatment by 2010.
What is your view of the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), the 50-billion-dollar initiative of the Bush administration in the United States?
Everybody is so shocked at getting a sizeable amount of money that they forget that there are tremendous flaws in Pepfar, most of which are destructive towards women. The amount of money is not sufficient and they should be clamoring for much more instead of this endless acting as a cheerleader for the administration.
Do you have some specific examples of ways in which you say it falls short?
Pepfar still insists that up to 50 percent of the preventative monies be spent on abstinence and fidelity when abstinence clearly isn't a choice for so many women, not only young women who are already sexually active, but women in marriage. Fidelity isn't the problem of the women in marriage; it's the problem of the men in the marriage … It's an outrageous continuation of an ideological weapon wielded by an administration which is reactionary and out of touch with the real world.
Then there is the prostitution gag rule, where you can't work with sex workers when in fact they are a high-risk group with whom organizations must work. That's another attack on women. And then there's the fact that you can't do reproductive and sexual health in conjunction with work on HIV/Aids when obviously the two are inexorably linked. That's another attack on women.
Here you have a piece of legislation where the money is inadequate and the flaws are all rooted in misogyny… in attacks on women. People are applauding it as if it's some sort of contemporary Marshall Plan. That's crazy and it should be seen for what it is – both inadequate and irresponsible in many respects.
What do you think should be done?
People should demand more – much more. No one denies that when you pump several billion dollars into a response it will mean something. Of course it will; millions of people will be treated. That's terribly important.
But that's what we deserve to expect from the United States. You don't kneel down before a country because it's doing… something that the world has a right to receive. The American administration is so discredited, George Bush is such a lamentable president, that when anything of a positive kind happens people are prostrate at the unlikelihood of it and they shouldn't be.
The defining reality is that the United States is spending somewhere between 12.5 and 15 billion dollars a month on the war in Iraq and people are celebrating the fact that [it] will spend 10 billion dollars a year to fight the three worst communicable diseases in the world, which collectively have taken between 30 and 50 million lives. In the case of Aids alone there are 33 million people living with the virus.
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So the distortion of priorities for conflict rather than human need is grotesque. People should not be cheering the United States for giving a pittance for fighting disease but should rather be asking: how can you be giving so little to the human condition and so much to the perpetuation of war?
How about the response of the United Nations to HIV/Aids in Africa?
There is just so much more to be done. Frankly, one of the things that is inadequate is the United Nations agencies. Some of it is bewildering.
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Lewis says "Here you have three determinative studies, definitive studies, we have UNAIDS and WHO encouraging male circumcision as a way of reducing transmission". They are NOT definitive. All three have the same flaws: * neither double-blinded nor placebo-controlled; * more safe-sex advice for the experimental groups (and some suggestion that circumcised men who didn't get the message got special treatment); * drop-out rate much higher than infection rate; * trials aborted before completion, and long-term effects can now never be known; * non-sexual transmission ignored; * demonstrated greater risk to women. * a quite small... [Read Full Text]
Saddest of all, people point to the benefits of male circumcision without noting that the NIH-funded American researchers responsible for these three studies continue to overlook traditional, simpler, more acceptable, and more practical ways of promoting STD-stifling as well as HIV-prevention personal hygiene: washing after sex. In 2006 the respected "Journal of AIDS" published a report on the first scientific study to show that men who "bathed" for at least 10 minutes within an hour of sexual intercourse got protection from HIV infection, even if they were not circumcised. Education about post-sex hygiene in African countries could be... [Read Full Text]
Left out of Stephen Lewis's bio was that he is a circumcised man from a circumcising culture who thinks nothing of amputating healthy normal body parts, whereas most of the world views amputation as a last resort.
It's a mystery why Lewis can't recognize the fallacy of circumcision to fight AIDS. Most of the US men who have died of AIDS were circumcised at birth. Several African nations have markedly higher AIDS rates among their circumcised populations.
The foreskin includes over half a male's sensual nerve endings. Many of the AIDS-ravaged places in Africa also have poor... [Read Full Text]
How about his country Canada; what have they done ? It is easy for these diplomat types to lambast other countries but they never say a hoot about their home countries. Charity starts at home; that is what he needs to be talking about first; his country Canada.
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