Envoy calls profs to
action on AIDS
BY ANNE BURKE
UCLA Today Staff
United Nations special envoy Stephen Lewis urged UCLA scientists
to speak up against “damaging ideological agendas” that
undermine the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Speaking at the UCLA AIDS Institute’s symposium on AIDS in
Africa on April 15, Lewis said scientists face a moral imperative
to challenge the Bush administration’s policy of abstinence
over condom use, which he said “makes no sense.”
“It is important to confront these things publicly,”
said Lewis, UN special envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa. “There
are millions of lives hanging in the balance.”
The symposium drew a turn-away crowd of about 135 people to the
newly renovated Amber Dance Studio in Glorya Kaufman Hall. Participants
included African health professionals fighting the pandemic on the
frontlines in Rwanda, Angola, Uganda and South Africa, and HIV/AIDS
specialists from the UCLA AIDS Institute and Charles R. Drew University
of Medicine and Science.
Keynote speaker Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science
and medical writer, warned that HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis
threaten sub-Saharan Africa with the kind of economic and social
collapse that befell 14th-century Europe as a result of the bubonic
plague.
Garrett said that countries with high mortality rates face “ethnocide,”
the loss of ethnic and cultural identities, because parents don’t
live long enough to pass on history and traditions. As grandparents
die, children will be left to fend for themselves. Already, a “Lord
of the Flies” power structure has taken hold at an Uganda
fishing village where most of the parents have succumbed to AIDS,
Garrett said.
Speakers discussed innovative solutions to the viral firestorm
that already has claimed tens of millions of lives. Nursing Professor
Chandice Covington described her work with Kenyan nurses teaching
aunts and grandmothers to re-lactate so that they can feed breast
milk to the babies of HIV-positive mothers. Garrett promoted the
use of cargo containers as “doc-in-a-box” mobile AIDS
clinics.
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