Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Friday, November 29, 2002

Of course, this week saw the release of the UK budget, which has been broadly discussed and dissected. It's one of those "we are so optimistic we can comfortably borrow massively to offset the optimism of our previous forecast" budgets, but there you go. Is anyone getting the feeling that the wheels are coming off the economic miracle somewhat?

And meanwhile, comparatively unheralded, UNAIDS released its summary of HIV and AIDS growth worldwise - the whole report is here. And makes depressing reading. As you might expect. Not many gags. Heterosexual infection in the West is up, and Eastern Europe in particular is going great guns, although the Right will probably be OK with that because the major victims are still drug users. But the really depressing reading comes form the reports on the developing world and, in particular, Africa. AIDS is not just killing people, but it is vitiating the capacity of sufferers to raise their children, grow food, work - it is going to contribute massively to the farming crisis and subsequent famine across the continent, and is destroying the infrastructure of whole countries.

Basically, Africa is fucked. But let's imagine. Let's imagine, say, that drug companies stopped restricting the production of generic anti-retrovirals, or discounted their own to take into account the fact that African health services tend not to be cash-rich. At present heroic missions are undertaken by activists who smuggle generic drugs into countries where their sale is prohibited. But heroes are themselves an antibody; if a country needs heroes, that's a sign that it is sick. And then. perhaps, the IMF could stop positing austerity measures as a condition for aid, and instead help to build infrastructure to allow aid to be distributed efficiently and without corruption. And while we're there, why not provide the time, the space, the resources and the personnel to take health education a little more seriously? Because when an entire generation is dying, including your doctors, nurses and key workers, you really don't have much spare energy to look at prevention and protection.

Oh, sorry, you're right. I'm being silly. We have a war to engineer (a wedding to plan, a bride to murder....we're swamped). Africa will probably improve on its own. All the signs for a healthy recovery are there, after all. It's not like we're looking at nations with the lowest GDPs in the world having to beg for scraps at the table of the richest nations on Earth or anything.

A friend mentioned to me last night that when Foucault discovered that there was a disease that appeared to be specific to gay men, was fatal and had no cure, he just fell to the ground and laughed hysterically for about five minutes, on the grounds that it was just too perfect. As you look at the statistics, and count off the list of risk groups (women, Africans, African-Americans, drug users, homosexual men) it just seems to get more and more so. The virus was designed by Norman Rockwell. It's the only logical conclusion.