‘A disease of poverty, ignorance and despair’

By FRED WEIR

The global AIDS (Aquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome) epidemic, which
has now claimed nearly 14,000 victims in
North America alone, is rapidly assum-
Ing crisis proportions. It is time to take a
hard look at the ways in which our
governments and medical establish-
ments are responding, because how well
they succeed in meeting this critical chal-
lenge will depend largely upon how
Sound our social system is at its core.

So far, the results are not encouraging.
One of the most disturbing symptoms of
a breakdown in social leadership is the
bizarre controversy that has erupted
Over children with AIDS being ‘‘main-
Streamed’’ through the public school sys-
tem. No one can possibly have missed
the public brawl about this in New York
City — it has taken place in the full glare
of media attention — but the issue is
already surfacing, more quietly, in a
number of major Canadian cities as well.

On one side of the dispute stand self-
righteous municipal authorities and pub-
lic health officials who insist, with the full
Weight of the scientific and medical
establishments behind them, that chil-
dren with AIDS represent no threat of
Contagion and should therefore be sent to
School in the normal way.

' The scientific case is, in fact, over-

Priorities’ shift vital to a

whelming that AIDS cannot be spread
through casual contact. It is virtually cer-
tain that AIDS children do not pose a
threat to their classmates. But while the
bureaucrats and politicians posture as
enlightened and rational leaders, stand-
ing up to a wave of ‘‘prejudice’’ and
‘hysteria’, in practice, by deciding to
“mainstream” these children, they are
washing their hands of them: send them
to school and let nature quietly take its
course.

Aids Children

On the other side stand various pa-
rents’ groups, people who are frightened
for their children and terrified of the un-

-known possibilities of the AIDS
epidemic.

However, the so-called ‘“‘hysteria’’ of
these people deserves to be examined
more closely.

The experience of working people in
this society is that disaster can strike out
of the blue, with no rationality and they
will be left completely helpless against it.

Insecurity is a fundamental condition
of life in our system. Whether the threat
is violent crime, sudden illness, un-
employment, or even nuclear war,
people are thrown upon their own re-
sources and made to feel personally re-
sponsible for their fate. It is hardly sur-
prising, then, that parents do not trust the

Modern society today

in Soviet Kirghizia

Recently I visited the Soviet Republic

of Kirghizia, as part of a group of journal-
ists. This republic is in Asia and borders
on ‘the Soviet republics of Kazakh,
Uzbek and Tajik and also on China.

There, in this fascinating land, I saw
‘OW in the course of my lifetime, an il-
literate, nomadic people, by their own
efforts and with the generous help of
more advanced Soviet republics, have
built a modern society and transformed
themselves in the process.

_ With four million people, this republic
1S nearly as large as the combined area of
Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and
Switzerland. Half the people live at an
elevation of one to 3,000 meters above
Sea level, because this is a mountainous
Country with some of the largest peaks in
the Soviet Union. Three quarters of the
People live in valleys where, with the

lp of irrigation, there is a thriving agri-
Culture and animal husbandry.

What is remarkable in the history of

'tghizia is that it first became a country
with its own government after the estab-
lishment of Soviet power. Before that it
Was an Asiatic outpost of the Czarist em-
Pire, living under patriarchial feudalism.
€ Kirghizians had no written language
of their own before 1924, no educational
System, no newspapers, no theaters and
NO modern industry.

Today there is a written language,
‘reated by Russian scholars using the
Cyrillic alphabet, which facilitated the
Process of eliminating illiteracy and
ealding a modern educational system,

Ith free tuition from the elementary to
ee Most advanced level. The average life
eee has risen from 40 to 70 years
os Infant mortality is less than one-tenth

What it was before, due to better living

From
Moscow

Jack

Phillips

conditions and the introduction of uni-
versal medicare free of charge.

Today, as a result of their own work
and with the assistance of other Soviet
republics, Kirghizia has built a powerful
industrial base, including machine build-
ing, manufacturing, food production.

In the countryside they have gas for
cooking, telephone and radio commu-
nication, and electricity and are serviced
by trucks and planes. I went into a large,
felt tent at a station and saw a big tele-
vision set, a sound system for music and
a big radio. The head of the family proud-
ly told me that he, his family, his horses
and his poultry had been moved from the
village by truck and that his older chil-
dren were attending a boarding school in
the village.

Because of the fertility of the land and
the availablity of meat supplies, cereals,
vegetables, fruit, dairy products, fish and
other foods, both the rural and the urban
people eat very well. That was not the
case in the old days.

No propaganda from the West will

‘ever convince these people that the

western way of life is a better one. It was
Soviet power that brought them into the
20th century, gave them national status
and personal dignity and provided them
with a good life and a secure future.

:

“Sooner or later we are going to need a
large-scale allocation to conquer this
disease, and the place to begin right now
is with the young whose lives are being
foreclosed by AIDS, and by narrow-
minded, budget-cutting irresolute poli-
ticians and beaucrats.”

assurances of public officials concerning
AIDS: =

Egged on by various populists and op-
portunists, and by some sections of the
media, the parents’ groups have been
demanding that AIDS children be kept at
home, presumably to die there. Out of
sight, out of mind.

Need to Conquer Disease

Both sides in this dispute seem to see
child victims of AIDS as hopelessly,
terminally ill. In reality, though, these
children are not necessarily “‘goners’’,
and a healthy society would not treat
them as such. Sooner or later we are
going to need a large-scale allocation of
social resources to conquer this disease,
and the place to begin, right now, is with
the young whose lives are being fore-
closed by AIDS, and by narrow-minded,
budget-cutting, irresolute political lead-
ers and bureaucrats.

There are strong reasons why children
with AIDS should not be ‘‘main-
streamed”’ through the public school sys-
tem. Not because they present a con-
tagious threat to their classmates, but
quite the reverse. A school full of nor-
mal, healthy children abounds with any
number of readily-communicable dis-
ease micro-organisms — chicken pox,
measles, whooping cough, influenza,
etc. —all of which pose a deadly menace
to the immune deficient child.

It may be necessary to construct spe-
cial facilities where children with AIDS
can continue their education, but where
their environment can be controlled, air
and food filtered, and medical efforts

- focussed upon their plight. A good deal

of recent evidence suggests that children
with AIDS survive far better than adults
— some have gone into complete remis-
sion — and there is every reason to be-
lieve that, with a major effort, they can
be kept alive until effective treatments
are found. An optimistic society, one
with vision and leadership, would pull
out all the stops to make that possible.

An Epidemic of Poverty
There is another aspect to this. Like
most epidemics of the past, AIDS dis-
proportionately attacks the lower eche-
lons of society. Although it first appeared
— in North America at least — among

ttack AIDS

the homosexual community, it has by
now moved well beyond that enclave.
In the Third World, the epidemic is
running wild. Central Africa, where the
AIDS virus almost certainly originated,
may have millions of cases. In parts of

Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi, up to 12 per |

cent of the population is afflicted.

_News Analysis
aaa ee ee

In Haiti. and other Caribbean islands,
AIDS is rampant. It is becoming clear
that AIDS is most likely to strike down
those whose immune systems are al-
ready weakened by environmental fac-
tors: overcrowding, lack of sanitation,
malnutrition, and repeated infections of
all types — in short, the poor.

The tiny southern Florida community
of Belle Glade, population 19,000, has an
AIDS rate 50 times the U.S. national
average. Belle Glade is also one of the
most impoverished towns in America,
inhabited primarily by Black and His-
panic migrant workers. Medical re-
searchers who have been there report
squalid conditions, filth, swarms of in-
sects, “‘raw sewage on the ground and
rats running all around’’.

Throughout the U.S., AIDS is increas-
ingly seen as an inner city affliction. It
has ceased to be “‘the gay plague’’, and is
becoming, predominately, a disease of
poverty.

Given this reality, present efforts by
government and. medical establishments
to develop a treatment for AIDS fall far
short of what is required. Undoubtedly it

will be a fine thing when the pharma- | ~
- ceutical industry develops an effective

chemotherapy, or a vaccine that it can
market. But ths will not stop the spread
of AIDS in our cities and neighborhoods,
any more than the availability of anti-
biotics for the past 40 years has defeated
syphillis, gonorrhea, or a host of other
common infections.

Preventive Medicine

What we need are vigorous, well-
funded programs which combat the pat-
terns of drug-abuse and promiscuity that

_ Spread AIDS, but more important, pro-

grams which deal with the underlying so-
cial conditions in which the disease
flourishes: poverty, ignorance, un-
employment, despair.

We need a medical establishment that
belongs to the people, with the health and
welfare of all the people its first priority.

We need doctors who will stop being
primarily pill-pushers and touts for the
medical hi-tech industry, and become in-
stead social activists; who will bring
education, treatment and preventive
medicine into the communities that need
it most.

Most of all, we need political leaders
who priorities reflect a genuine concern
for public health and welfare, rather than
the pseudo-enlightened, do-nothing
posture that most of them have so far
adopted.

The German Democratic Republic —
which does not yet have a single reported
case of AIDS — recently set up a top
level governmental-scientific-medical
committee to deal with the disease if, and

._ when it appears. This reflects the ap-

proach of a prepared society, one that is
determined to commit social resources
up to whatever level may be required to
ensure public safety.

Clearly, the solution to the AIDS §

epidemic will ultimately have to involve
a social transformation, and a radical

shift in the priorities that govern our

system.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 16, 1985 e 7