One in Three in G7 Ignorant About AIDS

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters)Nov. 29th. - One in three adults in the world's top industrial democracies say they know little or nothing about AIDS, a disease thought to have killed more than 28 million people in the past 26 years, a poll showed on Thursday. But the survey, carried out by Ipsos for the World Vision charity, found that in the seven countries studied, 44 percent of respondents would be willing to pay more taxes to combat AIDS, including 50 percent in the United States.

More than 3,500 people in the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan -- the Group of Eight countries minus Russia -- were interviewed for the survey, released ahead of U.N. World AIDS Day on Saturday. Richard Stearns, president of World Vision U.S., a Christian group that says it combats poverty and injustice worldwide, told a United Nations news conference that millions were ignorant of AIDS because it was "not real" for them. "It's not personal, it is somebody else's problem and somebody else's disease, and very often in a place very, very far away and remote from their everyday lives," he said.

AIDS, which attacks the immune system and can be spread by sexual contact or blood transfusion, was first detected in the United States in 1981. World Vision says some 6,000 children a day currently lose a parent to AIDS. The Ipsos poll found that in the countries surveyed, Canadians were the most concerned about AIDS and Japanese the least. Japan was also the country where the most people -- 53 percent -- admitted to little or no knowledge of the disease. Germans said they were the most knowledgeable, with 80 percent claiming to know "some" or "a lot" about the issue. The comparable figure for the United States was 70 percent. In the countries taken together, one in four people thought the AIDS problem had been "greatly exaggerated" by the media, the survey said. Nevertheless, Stearns said he believed the citizens of the countries polled were "ahead of their governments" in their view of how much should be done to fight AIDS. "I think that goes contrary to the view in Washington," he said. "I don't think Washington realizes that that many Americans care about AIDS at that level. "So in a way it gives them the political cover to do more because ... when you have 50 percent of the country saying 'you could raise my taxes if you could use that money to do more for HIV and AIDS,' that's a message that our politicians I think are not aware of," he said.

The United Nations says some 33 million people worldwide are infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, including those who have developed the illness.
By Patrick Worsnip
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German Priest Urges Re-Think on HIV/AIDS

Trier, Germany (ENI) August 29th. A German Roman Catholic priest living in Cape Town and working with AIDS orphans has urged a re-consideration of the ban on condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, saying that the theology of his church on AIDS is more than 40 years out of date. In a book "God, AIDS, Africa", published in Germany during August, the Rev. Stefan Hippler appeals to Pope Benedict XVI to come up with a theological response to the AIDS pandemic facing Africa.
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Human Trafficking Helps Spread HIV/AIDS

COLUMBO 22 August: Reuters UNAIDS estimates 5.4 million people were living with HIV in the Asia Pacific region in 2006, with anywhere between 140,000 and 610,000 people dying from AIDS-related illnesses. "Both human trafficking and HIV greatly threaten human development and security." "The link between human trafficking and HIV/AIDS has only been identified fairly recently," Wiesen-Antin told the International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.

About 300,000 women and children are trafficked across Asia each year, acclerating the spread of HIV/AIDS, the United Nations said on Wednesday. "Trafficking ... contributes to the spread of HIV by significantly increasing the vulnerability of trafficked persons to infection," said Caitlin Wiesen-Antin, HIV/AIDS regional coordinator, Asia and Pacific, for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Major human trafficking routes run between Nepal and India and between Thailand and neighbours like Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Many of the victims are young teenage girls who end up in prostitution. "Neither HIV/AIDS nor human trafficking have been integrated or mainstreamed adequately, either at policy or programmatic level." That makes it the world's second largest number of people living with HIV after sub-Saharan Africa, where 25.8 million people are infected with the virus. Conference host Sri Lanka has one of the lowest rates of HIV in Asia, with an estimated 5,000 infected people out of a population of around 20 million. Neighbouring India, by comparison, has the world's third highest HIV caseload after South Africa and Nigeria, with around 2.5 million people living with the virus.
By Ranga Sirilal
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No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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