Just a couple of days ago I mentioned the industry myth that everyone is at risk of being infected with HIV, but I didn't expect to come across this piece of 1980s PR again so soon. Nor did I expect to find it in the New Republic.
Most disturbingly, the article is about "interactive maps depicting where AIDS infections were most prevalent [in the US]". These maps corroborate what statistics have shown for a long time, that the people most likely to be infected live in certain identifiable places, that the epidemic is often associated with poverty, and that black people are far more likely to be infected than white people.
I find this disturbing because, having depicted so clearly that people living in certain parts of the country where the population is either poor, black or both are far more likely to be infected, the lead researcher is quoted as saying that "the fundamental, scientific truth of HIV hasn’t changed. Anybody can still get it."
This is not a 'scientific truth', nor any other kind of truth. It was realized a long time ago that many powerful people would not support a program to address a disease that was said to be prevalent mainly among men who have sex with men and injection drug users. So campaigns were based on spurious 'expert opinions', and data was massaged to suggest that everyone was at risk.
Fair enough, in the US it may have seemed at the time that men who have sex with men and injection drug users were already discriminated against, and this prejudice would need to be addressed before much progress could be made against the recently discovered virus. The campaigns were supposed to take the heat off these (at that time) marginalized groups.
It probably worked in the case of men who have sex with men, although it wasn't so successful for those who inject drugs. But one of the biggest fallouts from the campaign was the effect it had on what became the received view of HIV in African countries, some of which still had very low prevalence at the time, but would eventually suffer the worst epidemics in the world.
The HIV industry was built around the promulgation of the view that if HIV prevalence was highest among people who only engaged in heterosexual sex, as it was found to be in high prevalence African countries, they must have engaged in massive amounts of sex, and it must be very unsafe sex.
But even after the industry abandoned its claim about everyone being at risk, they didn't abandon the myth that most HIV transmission in African countries is a result of unsafe heterosexual sex. As a result, three decades of unsafe healthcare has almost entirely escaped the attention of the industry, along with the billions thrown at the virus.
Some in the industry still pontificate about more women than men being infected in African countries, the fact that babies are still being infected despite scaling up of antiretroviral drugs, high death rates despite the amount of money spent on treatment, etc, but none of them have asked about non sexual risks, through unsafe healthcare, cosmetic and traditional practices.
It was OK to talk about non-sexual transmission in the early days, and it's still OK to talk about it when children are infected (and, on rare occasions, white, middle-class heterosexuals in Western countries, presumably). So why is it difficult to accept that adults in African countries, even adults who are sexually active, can also face non sexual risks?
Groups of people said to be at higher risk of infection in African countries were identified left, right and center, but none of them were identified for their non sexual risks, only for their assumed sexual risks. Almost all women (of course), 'mobile' people (not just transport workers, but also migrant workers, soldiers and many others), those engaged in certain occupations, such as fishing and mining, etc.
But women who are sexually active tend to visit health facilities, sex workers visit sexually transmitted infection clinics, so do soldiers and transport workers (and others), big employers such as mines often provide some kind of rudimentary health services, as do some government departments; healthcare is not as ubiquitous as sex, but it is pretty widespread in certain places.
Those who were not at risk, in contrast, often seemed to be poorer people, uneducated people, rural dwelling people, people who didn't live very close to infrastructure or health services, unemployed people and others, whose low risk is explained away by rubbish about smaller sexual networks and the like.
The myth about everyone being at risk of HIV is dangerous because it is so closely related to the myth that HIV is almost always transmitted sexually in African countries. If people don't know the non sexual risks, they will not know that they need to avoid them, or how to avoid them; if risky practices in health, cosmetic and other facilities are not addressed, they will continue to occur.
[For more about HIV infection through unsafe healthcare, cosmetic and traditional procedures, see the Don't Get Stuck With HIV website.]
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