28 Stories Of Aids In Africa Pdf

01.09.2019

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28 Stories of Aids in Africa

Living with HIV in Africa: personal stories What does it mean to live with HIV and AIDS in the developing world? With the International AIDS Conference in full swing this week, we have put together a collection of stories and experiences from HIV positive people.

by Stephanie Nolen

Portobello £12.99, pp408

This may not, at first glance, seem like an appealing book: 28 true stories of people in Africa who have HIV/Aids or have been touched by it - that's one story for each million of the estimated 28 million people infected in Africa. But in fact, it is both brilliant and enraging, and contains accounts of some extraordinary people doing courageous things to fight the epidemic which go a long way to counter other stories of hopelessness, ignorance and corrupt or inept government.

Stephanie Nolen is an award-winning Canadian journalist who has lived in Africa for six years. The way Aids was ravaging the continent became clear to her while she was covering the crises in Uganda and Sudan and the aftermath of conflict in Sierra Leone and Rwanda. Her work in those areas brought her into contact with agencies such as Medecins Sans Frontieres - one of the few organisations trying to bring antiretroviral drugs and other treatments to HIV/Aids sufferers.

In the developed world, pregnant women carrying the virus are given a simple treatment in labour, along with their baby, and discouraged from breastfeeding. This lowers the risk of transferring the virus to about 2 per cent. In Africa, fewer than 10 per cent of pregnant African women get such interventions and, unlike here, almost none are tested for HIV; 700,000 HIV-positive babies are born every year, and most die before the age of five.

Then, of course, there is the dispute between Aids campaigners and the drugs firms that oppose generic antiretroviral treatments; the reluctance of governments such as Thabo Mbeki's to accept that HIV is sexually transmitted, or that ARVs can diminish the impact of the virus; and the fact that long-distance truckers in Rwanda and Uganda believe that they need to have regular unprotected sex to stay healthy.

Thankfully, there are some stories that stop you from totally giving up on humanity - from the tireless doctors who treat Aids patients to the campaigners who refuse to buy their own medication until it is freely available to all. Christine Amisi, for example, left the safety of a UN compound to continue her work as a nurse for MSF, risking her life in order to ensure that her patients got supplies of drugs. Nelson Mandela took on his own successor, Mbeki, when he realised that South African policy on the disease was causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, including that of his own son. Dr James Orbinski, who was president of MSF when the organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, says of the book: 'Read. Weep. Rage. And above all else - like those people described in this book - find the courage to do.'

This is a call to arms, to a battle that we should all have been fighting for a very long time.

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APA Citation

Nolen, Stephanie. (2007). 28 stories of AIDS in Africa. Melbourne : Text Pub

MLA Citation

Nolen, Stephanie. 28 stories of AIDS in Africa / Stephanie Nolen Text Pub Melbourne 2007

Australian/Harvard Citation

Nolen, Stephanie. 2007, 28 stories of AIDS in Africa / Stephanie Nolen Text Pub Melbourne

Wikipedia Citation

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