Washington, DC — As the AIDS toll mounted in Africa, health and development agencies around the world began to realize that their metrics for calculating progress needed a drastic overhaul. No longer could groups that trained teachers expect those trainees to live to teach more than a few years.
Architects, accountants, scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs -- the educated middle class that should be lifting African nations from poverty -- began to die in unfathomable numbers. Problem's began problems, in what became a cascading series of interlinked obstacles to reducing transmission.
One example: According to the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit company, Safe Blood for Africa, only about half of the estimated six million blood transfusions in Africa annually are tested for infectious diseases. And another million and a half transfusions may be improperly performed. Providing equipment and training for blood testing is one thread of a fragile but massive web that must be knit to block the exponential spread of the virus.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is among the agencies that has tried to publicize efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, including those in Africa. Past efforts include the web site, NetAid.org, launched with the backing of Cisco corporation.
Most recently, the development agency has been aggressively supplying information about the crisis to media organizations. For most of the past ten days, an international group of some 30 journalists, joined by their Senegalese colleagues, have been travelling in Senegal, regarded as Africa's leading success in the war on AIDS.
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Djibril Diallo, Director of the UNDP Communications Office, says the trip was intended to brief reporters "on the devastating speed with which the disease has become the greatest catastrophe facing Africa." He says that to allow the disease to continue unchecked is a death sentence for Africa.
" AIDS is killing an entire continent," he warns."It is a genocide going on in Africa. The only difference is that this time the genocide is perpetrated by Mother Nature." He says the UNDP must focus resources on AIDS or risk seeing "all the economic and social gains of the past decades in Africa wiped out."
Mamadou Bah, a UNDP spokesperson who was in Senegal for the journalists' briefings, says the lesson of the trip is to spurn complacency. Senegal was favored, he says, by a "concours de circonstance," a combination of factors that protected its population.
Part of its success is due to education. Information about HIV was being given to schoolchildren as early as the mid-1980s, in stark contrast to policies in many nations. But the strong family and cultural traditions that rebuffed the initial waves of the virus could prove deadly, if they contribute to a denial that the problem exists, in Senegal as elsewhere.
"We went behind the stereotype [of Senegal as a success story]," Bah says, "to examine the threats. And we saw the faces behind the stories." Bah and his colleagues at UNDP hope the stories behind those faces will contribute to greater world awareness and action.
