From
The Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
The unspoken truths about Aids
Epidemiologist Elizabeth
Pisani says political correctness over criticising sexual practices such as
multiple partners in Africa has prevented us finding an effective strategy to
fight HIV
After researching HIV for over a decade, I know that we now have the
information, the tools and the money required to eradicate Aids in most of the
world. But we’re not doing it – and that makes me very angry.
To be fair, Britain has been a world leader in sensible HIV prevention. Under
Margaret Thatcher, we were the first country to fund clean needles for drug
injectors at a national level, and to make methadone widely available so that
heroin addicts could stop injecting. The result: fewer than one in 75 drug
injectors in Britain is infected with HIV, compared with one in two in
Indonesia, for example.
For all its sensible policies, though, Britain won’t give out needles in
prison. Yet two-thirds of all injectors in Britain have been to prison at some
point; and nearly a quarter of all male injectors in prison say they’ve shot up
while inside. Meanwhile, taxpayers fund needle-exchange programmes in prisons in
other countries through the Department for International Development. But in
Britain, the Home Office dictates what happens in prison, and denial rules.
I call it the Three Monkeys approach to HIV: we close our eyes to people
injecting drugs, to people buying and selling sex, to people getting plastered
and getting laid. We close our eyes, in short, to all the things that do the
most to spread HIV.
Yet we can’t close our eyes to the fact that nearly 60m people have been
infected with a preventable, fatal disease. About 25m of those are already in
their graves. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that two-thirds of people with
HIV in the world are Africans. Yet few people ask why.
HIV is largely a sexually transmitted infection, so there must be something
different about sex in Africa. Yet you can’t say that without appearing to be
racist. So campaigners have come up with other reasons that HIV is worse in
Africa: poverty, ignorance, men having more power than women. All politically
correct, but not epidemiologically correct.
The truth is that a society in which many people have two or three partners
on the go at any one time will produce a bigger epidemic than a society where
people may have 10 partners in five years, but only one at a time. And it’s a
fact that in parts of Africa, it’s more common for both men and women to have
two or three simultaneous relationships than to have serial partners. Do people
behave in this way because they are poor and ignorant? Not in Bangladesh, or
Bolivia, or dozens of other countries where incomes and literacy are low.
Indeed, in Africa, the incidence of HIV infection is highest in the richest
households and the richest countries.
In east Africa, HIV spread first among people who had lots of partners – in
other words, men and women who traded sex for money or favours. Had condom use
in commercial sex been pushed to very high levels at the time – as happened in
Thailand – the epidemic would have been contained.
But most African leaders played Three Monkeys. So a miner infected a
prostitute, who infected another client, who went home and infected his wife,
who infected her regular boyfriend. Suddenly, HIV was everyone’s problem.
In Africa. Outside the continent, most people infected with HIV are men who
have *201* sex with other men, people who inject drugs and people who buy and
sell sex, as well as their lovers. Indeed, it was these groups that first surfed
into public consciousness. Early in the epidemic, the virus was treated as a
sign of wickedness, a black mark for bad behaviour. But voters don’t care for
the wicked; ergo, politicians don’t care for the wicked. Ergo, no money for HIV.
God knows, we needed it. When I started out in this business in the mid1990s,
the world was spending just $250m a year on HIV in poor countries. Later, as
African infection rates soared, HIV was repositioned as an affliction of the
innocent. The cash started to roll in and, last year, the world spent $10
billion on HIV in poor countries.
When the funding pie was small, HIV prevention meant doing helpful things for
sex workers, gay men and drug injectors. Now that the pie has grown to 40 times
its original size, and HIV has been painted as almost exclusively a matter of
poverty, youth and “innocent victims”, everyone wants a bite.
The UN agencies were the first to jump on to the growing pile of funding,
each finding a way to link the blood-borne virus to its own mandate. Other
agencies dealing with children, development, economics, labour and agriculture
all suddenly found that HIV was fundamental to their work. But the trail of
funding hasn’t always taken them in the right direction.
It’s true, of course, that HIV has become a generalised problem in east and
southern Africa, where, frankly, it is hard to know what to do about it except
pray for better leaders. But what is true of those areas is simply not true for
the rest of the world – where the “Aids is everyone’s problem” approach can do a
lot of damage. A couple of years ago, I received an e-mail from Save the
Children UK, asking for a reference for someone who had applied to be their HIV
adviser in Indonesia. I asked why they needed an HIV adviser when only one in
22,000 of that nation’s children suffer from HIV – and most infections are in
adult men. The charity would have been better off working on routine health
services, education, even sanitation, I suggested. But no, Save the Children
would do HIV in Indonesia, come hell or high water, because it was a corporate
priority.
I felt like sending them to see Lenny Sugiharto. Lenny had come to the HIV
prevention group I worked with, looking for funding for an “information,
education and communication” programme for transgender sex workers (waria) in
Jakarta.
Our information on HIV among waria was sorely out of date. So we did a study;
and a week later, I went to the lab to pick up the colour-coded HIV test results
– red for positive, blue for negative. The list was a quarter red.
To the embarrassment of the lab staff, I wept. And when I told Lenny the
results, she went as grey as her Muslim headscarf. Then she drew up a new
proposal for prevention and care. If only the policy-makers of the world were
more like this transgender sex worker. If only governments, UN agencies, even
big nongovernmental organisations could relate the science to the reality and do
the things that make the most difference. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that.
Organisations raise money through appeals; and photos of orphans with big
eyes set the registers ringing. Have you ever seen a flyer with a prostitute on
it? Or a picture of a young guy about to inject himself?
Even Irish pop star Bono, so gifted at whipping up moral outrage, can
recognise a losing battle when he sees one. Bono’s Product (Red) campaign, which
allows people to feel good about buying gadgets because a fraction of the profit
goes to “fighting Aids”, is very careful about what it funds. So careful that it
actually breaks the rules of the Global Fund on Aids, TB and malaria, to which
it gives the “red pound”.
The fund was supposed to make it easier to pay for the difficult stuff – such
as needle exchanges, or clinics for sex workers. In theory, all the money goes
into a single pot. Poor countries put forward proposals, a panel of experts vets
each request, then millions are dished out to the most deserving.
Donors are not supposed to cherry-pick (“I’ll have the orphans, please;
thanks, but no junkies”). Yet (Red) has ploughed more than $100m into the Global
Fund – and every penny is earmarked for drugs to prevent pregnant women from
passing HIV on to their babies, for treatment of the sick and for support for
orphans.
In other words, (Red) has chosen the projects that consumers of iPods and Gap
T-shirts can feel good about. Because nearly everyone feels good about treating
sick people – but preventing them getting sick in the first place: well, that’s
a lot more controversial.
In east and southern Africa, two decades of denial and mismanagement have
allowed the HIV virus to hollow out whole countries. In the rest of the world,
HIV continues to threaten men and women who inject drugs, buy sex or sell it, as
well as men who have sex with one another. The lovers of those people are at
risk, too.
Together, they add up to tens of millions of souls – so we don’t want funding
for HIV to evaporate. We just want to be able to use more of the money doing
sensible things to prevent new infections.
Elizabeth Pisani’s new book, The Wisdom of Whores, is published by Granta
on Tuesday, priced £17.99. She blogs on sex and science at
www.wisdomofwhores.com
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher (1788-1860)
