Thursday 16:40:26
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With limited national and international funds that could be mustered to fight AIDS, the tragic reality is that millions of people worldwide will continue to get infected and die slowly of the ravages of HIV/AIDS and resulting opportunistic infections.
It is imperative therefore that the allocation of the very "limited funds" available through international AIDS Initiatives be prioritized:
- Provide incentives and prioritize foreign aid support to receptive governments with the political resolve to combat the epidemic. This should be evident if a government has well-defined policies and programs to combat the disease.
- Persuade the political leaders and pertinent policy makers of each country to realize that the logistics for AIDS prevention and treatment can come mainly from internal initiatives rather than through foreign subsidy.
- Persuade government to enact laws and policies to combat the root causes and major modes of transmission of disease in each country.
- Provide "creative subsidy" for evaluation and bulk delivery (if coming from foreign sources) of generic drugs and screening kits.
- Support the long term development and coordination of health and information infrastructure in each country or region.
- Stimulate and encourage national, regional and local initiatives through preferrential foreign aid incentives to these initiatives.
- Provide seed funds to develop health and information brigades in receptive countries.
- Manpower training
- Community health care workers
- Integrate the activities of NGOs and international organizations
- Coordinate the creation of "voluntary counseling and treatment (VCT)" units at the community level.
- Coordinate initiatives of international organizations and local NGOs.
- Establish internet and other multi-media resources to disseminate information and coordinate various international efforts.
- Develop an "
Untitled AIDS Primer " that will be translated to the different languages of the world and adapted for use in individual countries or cultures and serve as a general guideline for combating AIDS in less developed countries. - Establish an AIDS forum to allow continuous international dialog among the researchers and policy makers
- Maintain database of initiatives (or "Best Practices") from different countries and localities (especially those initiated by NGOs). Include analysis of initiatives that succeeded (e.g., Senegal, Thailand) or failed -- to serve as models for development of similar initiatives in other countries or communities.
- Develop an "
- Understand the mechanisms of spread of disease that contribute to the spread of AIDS in each society and culture.
- Identify the major modes of transmission for each community. Focus on socio-cultural and political changes to prevent the major modes of transmission.
- Identify the cultural factors (e.g., polygamy, circumcision, tattooing, "widow-inheritance", etc.) and encourage changes, at the community and government level (e.g. enactment of laws or provisions) to counter the impact of these factors in the AIDS epidemic.
- Monitor, register, educate and care of "sex workers", tourism workers, "mobile people" (e.g., businessmen, merchants, long-distance drivers, soldiers, etc.), etc.
- Coordinate AIDS research and drug development and facilitate transfer of technologies to individual countries.
- Accelerate further AIDS drug and vaccine development.
- Develop simpler and cheaper HIV testing procedures.
- Develop mechanisms to improve and accelerate HIV/AIDS screening.
- Establish regional equivalents of the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to screen and evaluate generic drugs
With very limited national and international resources that can be allocated against the worldwide AIDS pandemic, the main strategy should be to muster untapped resources at the community level. For example, the origins of the very successful grassroots campaigns against AIDS in the United States have been spearheaded by volunteers that were largely unsupported by government funds. Similarly, the "AIDS Coalition" that led the successful fight against AIDS in Western countries was a voluntary coalition of diverse groups sometimes with divergent goals and did not rely heavily on government assistance.
Similar grassroots campaigns, in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focusing on economic and environmental issues, are beginning to emerge in less developed countries (LDCs). These NGOs must be nurtured and provided assistance to expand their activities that will include the fight against AIDS in their communities. However, these NGOs must be weaned also in relying too heavily from "national and international assistance" for their very existence. Instead, they must learn to tap the resources and voluntary manpower within the community and the nation -- just like the grassroots organization in the United States have done to fight AIDS.
From a more personal perspective and experiences with past international programs, it is not prudent to predicate the success of the worldwide fight against AIDS by relying largely from international funds. The ambitious international family planning program failed to curb world population growth, because it has been predicated too much on foreign aid assistance.
Many international assistance programs, including the "food aid" & "famine" programs, national economic development programs for the less developed countries (LDCs), etc. , have failed miserably because they relied too much on "Western solutions" to national and community problems that have historical, cultural and political roots.
In light of the above "commentary", visit part 3: The
Please click on AIDS Primer, if you do not see the A-Z navigation links, specific for this section. This page is a part of a much larger website -- "Treasures of the Internet" -- that includes other health-related sections, as well as other more general sections on the arts, literature, science, etc. If this is your first visit, please read "navigating this site", for further guidance.