Yesterday was the 10th World AIDS Day, an annual attempt by the United Nations to stimulate public awareness of the nature and the threat of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. As several expert commentators have pointed out, the sense of urgency seems to have dropped out of much of the campaign against AIDS over the past couple of years, perhaps because of some significant improvements in the treatment available for those who become infected by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). But that may be a perception in the developed world, the only parts of the globe where any effective treatment is available, never mind the best available treatment.
In Dublin, where treatment is available, Mr Tony Geoghegan of the Merchant's Quay Project (which deals with young drug abusers) said that this treatment required a stability and discipline which is usually absent from the lives of those who inject drugs intravenously; and his colleague, Father Sean Cassin, said that surveys of first-time users of the Project's needle exchange scheme indicated an increase in the high-risk behaviour of sharing needles with others. Intravenous drug users are the biggest single category of persons in Ireland with HIV and AIDS, and represent a very significant pool of potential infection from which the disease may be spread to non-drug-users.
Almost 1,800 HIV tests carried out in this State have proved positive, 46 of them between March and August this year. By the end of September there had been 311 deaths from AIDS, according to data released by the Department of Health. There will assuredly be more, no matter what treatment is made available, and there is still every reason to maintain public awareness of the risks of exposure to HIV and the means of avoiding such risks through behavioural change or by way of safer drug-abuse techniques or safe sexual practice. Lives are still at unnecessary risk in Ireland and effective preventive education remains very important.
But the risk in Ireland is as nothing when set beside the devastation that AIDS continues to wreak in developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are most cases and least resources to deal with them. The new and improved triple therapy which has brought some modicum of hope (if no guarantee of survival) to AIDS sufferers in the developed world has little relevance in countries where there are insufficient resources even to guarantee a safe water supply for patients who have lost fluids because of the diarrhoea from which many suffer. About half of the estimated 30 million cases of HIV infection in the world are to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. Some 5.8 million people contracted HIV infection this year, more than 500,000 of them children.
It is not only the children who contract HIV infection that are damaged by the disease. Many lose their parents and are forced to seek menial work where they are then exposed to direct risk of infection themselves. It is hardly surprising that this year's World AIDS Day is focusing on "Children living in a world of AIDS". Nearly half of the estimated 2.3 million deaths from AIDS this year have been of women. But almost half a million of these deaths were of children. That is something to which those in this society who proclaim themselves to be pro-life might care to turn their attention.