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Crystal_Abongta
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Is HIV/AIDS linked to poverty?
October 28, 2003 - 09:12 AM
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Last friday 24th October, I attended a funeral for a neighbor who died of AIDS. There were the conspicuous imprints of poverty on every centimeter of the family as I got to know during the funeral. She was never on a good diet neither could she afford anti-retroviral drugs.
Worst still, sources close to her told me she had been indirectly selling sex to make a living and pay the school fees of her series of fatherless children.
This got me thinking, what is the links between HIV/AIDS and Poverty? This should make the object of this discussion post. We need to talk on this, anybody with some ideas?
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Crystal_Abongta
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Poverty has a hand in it all!
October 29, 2003 - 04:04 AM
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Now getting infected with HIV means you must have been exposed to some risk no mater the type. I ask myself then, what pushes people into risky situations? What is it that take people closer and closer to the virus especially when they know its there and they know what it takes to get infected let alone the aftermath?
Relating to our topic, it’s known today that about 80% of all new HIV infections came in through sexual intercourse. Those engaged in the sex industry – sex workers who sell sex for money are the most hit in this domain.
In Africa, most of the sex workers are women and they sell sex to make a living. (What an irony, killing themselves to make a living). Poverty is dealing dishing a heavy blow on the masses. In the process of making ends meet, some (almost the majority) engage in the filthy act of selling sex.
I have met people in families who depend on the income coming in from their family members engaged in the sex business. When you talk to them, they tell you they have to send their children to school, they have to pay medical bills and clothe themselves and that since its difficult getting jobs that pay, they resort to selling sex as the only way out. The morality of this and justification is relative.
Today in Cameroon for example, the streets team up in the evenings especially around drinking spots than during the day. We have many more traffic jambs during the night than during rush hours in the day. This market is really flourishing so to speak. The sex workers are making as much money as they are killing themselves with alcohol and the HIV.
Some of these sex workers even tell you they have patients in the house to take care off and so they need money. Money is fast becoming they essence of living and the more money they make, the more HIV is transmitted and retransmitted.
Well living with HIV is not as easy as one would suppose especially if the patient has to be on drugs – anti-retroviral drugs that are yet still expensive in the market. Subsidizing the economic demands in such a home means sending some of the females to the sex market. The trouble is really much more complicated and delicate than meets the eyes. Much has to be done both at the prevention level and caring.
Talking prevention takes us to the point where we consider the cause of the whole nightmare. It comes back to us like a boomerang, POVERTY. Alleviating poverty is in essence eradicating the transmission of HIV within the destitute communities.
Your ideas are welcome
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Temi Ige
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Re: Is HIV/AIDS linked to poverty?
October 29, 2003 - 07:18 AM
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Yes, I agree that poverty has something to do with HIV/AIDS. But you seem to be asserting that poverty is the cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS, which is not true. A number of factors, including promiscuity, uncensored blood transfusions, drug abuse, use of infected body-piercing instruments, such as needles, blades etc and even deliberate infection, are implicated and of equal, if not more, importance in the spread of HIV.
Although it is true that poverty robs people of their right to adequate hygiene, and healthcare, the provision of these social ammenities will do only little to stop the spread of HIV. I must at this point remind you that some people know about the existence of HIV, yet refuse to stop their commercial sex activities just becuase they are not well educated about what the virus is, its link to AIDS and its mode of transmission. Do you know that some still believe that HIV is not the causative organism for AIDS?
My friend, it is not enough to provide adequate healthcare or tell people about the existence of the virus and disease, people have to know a lot more. I can assure you that poor people know how to take care of themselves even more than rich people do, because they know that they have a limited amount of resources. So if someone is able to tell them how dangerous and diabolically destructive HIV is, that it has no known cure yet, and that it can be transmitted in several ways, it will do more to stop the spread and scourge of HIV/AIDS.
Note that I'm not trying to rule out the provision of healthcare as a way to manage the crisis, I'm only saying that we have to be realistic if we are to stop HIV dead in its tracks. The funds to provide good food and adequate anti-retroviral drugs are not very forth-coming, so let's combat HIV/AIDS by the way we can - education.
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Crystal_Abongta
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It takes us back to Poverty
October 29, 2003 - 09:13 AM
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Thank you my friend for the insight but I have a few things to put through relating to my earlier posting. I am in no way asserting that Poverty is a causative agent or solely responsible for the spread of HIV. I would be simply making things more difficult to understand if I did that. The biomedical facts of HIV/AIDS would hold true for always including all its various forms of transmission already over emphasized.
I’m rather saying that poverty is aggravating the situation and is a serious hindrance to the prevention of the disease; I hope we get this clearly. So good in your posting, you mention good medical care, provision of anti-retroviral drugs, education and the sort. Where do we get the finances to carry out such programme from? And that is exactly what I am saying. Africans don’t even have the money educate their people let alone caring for these people when they fall sick of AIDS
Sub-Saharan Africa for example remains the most hit region because of their pending poverty. Look at Asia, some of the Asian countries too are facing a crisis due to their financial bottlenecks. Statistics show clearly that those countries in the world suffering the pangs of the disease are the poorest countries.
If most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa had the financial resources to sponsor massive education and prevention programs, HIV would not be claiming as much lives as it is presently doing. And the fact that the people of the working group are dying, worsens the problem altogether by reducing productivity.
The social comportment of some Africans is fast becoming a function of their financial bargaining power. Ask yourself why people keep on with the sex commerce when they know the pending dangers of the HIV, why are others swindling the little funds reserved for fighting HIV in the name of embezzlement? You would come to the conclusion that prostitution, corruption and lack of healthcare all contributing factors to the spread of the HIV are due to poverty. The people are poor and need to get around this poverty.
People need to make a living but the avenues are not there. There is unemployment on the rise; the private sector is facing all the menacing from the local governments thus what do you expect? Things are getting as bad as they are getting. Jobless people resort to selling sex for money etc.
Well I am using economic cannons to elucidate my point because we are talking about poverty and so you bear with me. To make it clear and resounding again, I am saying that one of the factors responsible for the every increasing figures of HIV transmission is poverty keeping the biomedical facts aside. Poverty is widening the gully between the masses and Prevention, Care, Education etc.
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Crystal_Abongta
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Is it poverty or ill faith?
October 30, 2003 - 10:17 AM
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I got a phone call last night from a young girl. She’s 20yrs and told me her mother had expelled her out of the house. I invited her for a talk and when we met the next day, she recounted her pathetic story to me.
She’s living with her widowed mother and a younger brother in a two room house in a little neighborhood. Her mother sells cigarettes at a road junction in the neighborhood. Her father was poisoned some years back by a brother who refused regularizing his debt with him or come to an agreement on a land dispute they had.
Of recent, Bridget started having strange skin diseases and cough, her mother advised her to go for check up. The lab results showed that she was HIV positive. Her mother on getting the results sent her off from the house, and asking her to go meet her boyfriend. She went ahead to say she would not bear the shame of having “such” a patient in the house especially as she can’t even afford the care Bridget would eventually need.
Bridget told me to consider approaching her boyfriend with care so he goes for the test also and said she is certain he infected her. She was aware all along that he was meeting other girls but could do nothing about it since she was not ready to loose him and given that he provides all the money she needs.
While I am still figuring out how to help Bridget out of this delicate situation, I keep placing poverty at the center of this. Had it been her mother had the means to care for her daughter, she would not be sending her off. Her rationale is not good I understand but that’s what the mother thinks and that’s the reason she gives to justify her actions.
The question comes then; should poverty eradication be integrated into HIV/AIDS prevention programmes?
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Raymond M. Kristiansen
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Is it poverty or ill faith?
November 1, 2003 - 01:33 AM
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Originally posted by Abongta
...
The question comes then; should poverty eradication be integrated into HIV/AIDS prevention programmes?
Whether poverty eradication is integrated into the HIV/AIDS prevention programmes is irrelevant, if you ask me. I mean; the eradication of HIV/AIDS is important as a goal _in itself_, just as the goal of eradicating poverty is of utmost importance. Which one is the most important? I guess no-one can say.
But hmm... I support a more holistic point of view on health. To battle HIV is not just to develop medicine, it is also to educate people about using protection, and it is also about making it able for all to provide for themselves and their closest ones.
I think that we should do what we can to create more jobs in this world and also support those who are less fortunate than ourselves.
But then the question of globalization comes into the picture, and we realise that for many countries, there will be more unemployment as factory owners send their factories to for instance China instead, because there they can get workers for much less costs...
Poverty is surely a sickness which will stick with a large portion of people on this world for a very long time  But still, we should do what we can to help those that we _can_ help?
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Terri Willard
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Poverty and migration
November 7, 2003 - 02:41 AM
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A good friend of mine, Alyson Slater, is a project manager working on the Global Reporting Initiative's HIV/AIDS Project (http://www.globalreporting.org/guidelines/HIV/hivaids.asp). The result of an intensive eight-month effort, the reporting resource is aimed at organisations that want to report on their HIV/AIDS performance—including policies and practices; and at stakeholders who require a reputable reporting benchmark to assess organisations’ HIV/AIDS performance.
One of the things which Alyson mentioned to me was that some of the main supporters of HIV/AIDS campaigns in South Africa (where the guidelines were tested) were the mining companies. Apparently, these companies had started to realize that HIV was becoming endemic within their industry and decimating their workforce. Why? Because poor young men were recruited to work in the mines and separated from their families in other parts of the country for long periods of time. Lacking the resources and time to be with their families (a pretty good indicator of poverty in my mind), these young men frequently turned to prostitutes and/or substance abuse involving shared needles.
It becomes a cycle in which by migrating to seek to escape poverty, young men are placed in situations in which there may be higher levels of peer support to undertake risky behaviours, leading to higher rates of HIV, leading to ill health ... the loss of employment and increased poverty.
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SLOVENC
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Re: Is HIV/AIDS linked to poverty?
December 1, 2003 - 02:00 AM
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no, i don't think that poverty and AIDS are conected to much. well maybe, i don't know much about the situation in the countries where povery is a huge problem. i do think it's all about prevention. here you can get condoms in almost every shop that's why there are only 136 affected by HIV in my country, so i do think that all kinds of prevention should be offered everywhere, and there is one more thing which really is related to povery, if the person has allready got AIDS the drugs are not available to the people in poverty, so that's why i think all goverments should help the affected people rather than paying it's politicians for doing nothing!!!
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John Phipps
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Re: Is HIV/AIDS linked to poverty?
December 1, 2003 - 05:37 AM
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I have a class project to send charitable goods to a person in a 3rd world country to do this I need an adress. I can not use an organization so the address has to be of an individdual person, can any one help? Is anyone oput there living in a thrid world country?
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Crystal_Abongta
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Poverty and migration
December 1, 2003 - 08:16 AM
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Originally posted by taikod
It becomes a cycle in which by migrating to seek to escape poverty, young men are placed in situations in which there may be higher levels of peer support to undertake risky behaviours, leading to higher rates of HIV, leading to ill health ... the loss of employment and increased poverty.[/B]
I think I agree with you here in fact I have a first hand experience of what happens in such settings. By profession I am a geologist, I worked in one of the largest projects that the African continent has witnessed and that is the Chad – Cameroon Pipeline Project in which I was the Earthwork Assistant. I also help with my experience design an HIV/AIDS prevention programme for my company that ended up not created the desired impact for reasons I would get to latter.
The project was taking place far off from southern Chard, through northern to southern Cameroon. This is a zone especially in the south of Chad and north of Cameroon has little or no infrastructure. Most of the workers who came from almost all the continents of the world to work in this project either left their families back home or kept them in the mast accessible town to the project that from all studies is not lest than 500 Km form the project sites from all the ends.
This therefore means that workers were obliged to stay away from their families for long periods and then they often resorted to exchanging sex for money with the over population of prostitutes in the area. (These prostitutes like all others came from all the ends of Africa to be concentrated in this area)
With the construction and infrastructural development phase that ended last September, many of the workers are taking the HIV back with them to infect their spouses back home, the bachelors would go back to infect their girlfriends who might in turn start the distribution and the atomic fission theory continues.
The workers had the ready cash to spend and so could pay for anything on two legs; they would either distribute what they already had or get infected if not already infected. The women came there purposefully to sell sex and so either brought the virus with them from their different origins or would be taking it back.
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Crystal_Abongta
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Re: Is HIV/AIDS linked to poverty?
December 2, 2003 - 08:00 AM
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Originally posted by Bo
I have a class project to send charitable goods to a person in a 3rd world country to do this I need an adress. I can not use an organization so the address has to be of an individdual person, can any one help? Is anyone oput there living in a thrid world country?
Just some prompting ok and nothing much. Any good intension needs a direction, medium and clarity if the desired results are expected.
Firstly you want to send goods to Africa, good idea! But you don’t seem to know the destination exactly in Africa as the mail seems to suggest (Sorry if I got you wrong) and there is no purpose, objective ok specification of the type of goods. Africa has many countries and so you need to be specific.
Secondly it sounds strange that you would not want to use the address of an organization for that is the surest means if you want the goods to get to where you want them. The idea of sending them to a single individual leaves me doubting and wondering how you would guaranteed the success of your mission. It suffices for such a person to disappear into thin air after receiving the good.
May be you would like to look over your priorities again before considering asking for help.
Gracias
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David Weir
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A few thoughts
December 3, 2003 - 04:34 AM
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I don't think that HIV/AIDs has a direct link to poverty. I believe that because HIV/Aids originated in Africa, it is more likely this is the reason why it has hit the area much harder.
HIV has spread like a slow moving wild fire. And just like with any fire, it moves from one point to the next on a path, but, it must have fuel to keep it going. Oxygen and dry brush are the fuel for fire, if you take away the fuel the fire will go out.
The fuel that keeps HIV going is unprotected sex, IV drug use, blood transfusions, etc. If you take this away then so will the spread of HIV.
So, I guess a question could be can we rid the fuel that feeds the spread of HIV in areas of high poverty?
To answer this, I would sort of agree with you by saying "Why would anyone that lives in extreme poverty be concerned with tomorrow (of the consequences of tomorrow) when they have to worry about surviving today?"
When taking about the basic instinct of survival, it is far more important to get through today than tomorrow, so I would say yes, indirectly, there can be a link to HIV and poverty.
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Crystal_Abongta
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A few thoughts
December 3, 2003 - 05:29 AM
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Originally posted by davem909
...The fuel that keeps HIV going is unprotected sex, IV drug use, blood transfusions, etc. If you take this away then so will the spread of HIV...
I agree with some points in this statement but not all. Apart from unprotected sex, IV drug use is not common in a major part of Africa as yet and so not a problem. There is a systematic screening of all blood used in transfusions in the hospitals in Africa to about 70% as reported by the International Research Institute and so still not a major problem.
Poverty is making it hard to fight the disease and to manage the already infected population.
Poverty is pushing young women and men into prostitution, they need money to make a living and to sponsor their families especially in cases where the virus has plucked down the bread winners of the family.
It is due to poverty that certain parts of Africa are plagued by civil and ethnic wars and you well know the consequences vis-à-vis HIV/AIDS.
Summarily, poverty is a principal catalyst to the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa and the orient.
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jesse adams
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Re: Is HIV/AIDS linked to poverty?
February 3, 2004 - 02:55 AM
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Poverty and lack of education as to preventative measures are leading causes of viral transmission. It is easy to say the use of prophylactic barrier contraceptions will stop AIDS transmission but these have to be purchased and people have to be shown.educated in the use.
The transmission through sex workers is a major cause of disease profligation. Stopping prostitution is almost impossible, rather clinics and educational groups showing how protection can be used are far more effective. I have a friend who worked for WHO, who travelled Africa dispensing free contraception. She told me that one of the saddest things she saw was a young prosistute stringing the condoms into a necklace.
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steve aborisade
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Poverty,HIV/AIDS:An African Apocalypse?
February 3, 2004 - 04:41 AM
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Well,in Africa,the incidences of Hiv/aids can not be divorced from poverty!but the question we need to ask is if hiv/aids is not an African apocalypse?Poverty will be seen to be playing a minimal role here.The main problem in my opinion is ignorance and an unwillingness to adopt a new ways of doing things.I am going to propose various reasons for my submission,chief among them is that the average African has come to lack the will to face the truths in practicality(pragmatism)!What is,rather than what can be.We love mysticism and spirituality at the expense of reason and facts.Our interpretation of the concept of cause and effects is nothing but akward and defied all logic explanation!HIV/AIDS has a cause,but the cause must only be explained to the wrath of the angry gods!So,a solution can only come from the gods!Or in another retrospect,how do you explain the reason in the search for a cure for AIDS with an unprotected lay with aged women or babies? And in the lighter mood, a virgin! Believing that these could lead to a cure? The incidences of discrimination to people living with hiv/aids is not mainly due to the fact that it is transmissible but rather to the reality that those who the gods are punishing needs no sympathy!This is the reality in Africa!You can confirm,there are various claims to a cure to hiv/aids.Are they wrong?They may not be,they can well appease the gods to have mercy!For,healing is divine!An appocalypse?Check the rate of infection and deaths!With whole villages gone in some cases! 6 out of 10 critically ill suffering from one hiv/aids complications or the other in our hospitals,4 out of every 5 children born positive in parts of africa,poor health delivery,corrupt leaders who are not concerned,the female constitueccy remaining largely unempowewrd,and a large population still beleiving that hiv/aids is a white man's disease.What hope can you ascribe?In some villages where i have done enlightenement work,they are seeing the condom for the first time.Sadly again, the thrust of intervention on the issue is in the hands of uncommitted NGO workers who are only too eager to embessle funds approved for programs and are actually paying lip service to the global effort.90% of sufferers do not have acess to antiretroviral drugs and......To be continued
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