Michelle Scavone

A while ago, I was alerted to The Origins of AIDS – a documentary purporting that AIDS was started by polio vaccine researchers in the Congo. While I thought it a wild theory, it had some merit – and I am interesting in researching the idea in more detail and discussing it sensibly and logically – whilst maintaining a healthy level of scepticism. Imagine if something like that could be true? What a monster we created, and what a realisation that we inadvertently made Africa what it is today.

Considering a different take on the AIDS debate, this morning I read an interesting article on the Economist online. Among other things, the article discussed the improving treatments for AIDS victims, as well as certain opinions that money spent on AIDS education is misdirected and, in some instances, unnecessary. Dr Roger England wrote a somewhat controversial in the British Medical Journal in May asking for UNAIDS (the United Nations group that research, fund and educate others about AIDS) to be shut down, and for its resources to be directed elsewhere.

Some interesting things came to light for me in this article, notably:

• One copulation in 500-1000 with an infected individual will result in transmission. Instead, the risk comes with certain behaviour (anal intercourse, which risks tearing the lining of the gut; and injecting drugs using dirty needles)
• Malaria and tuberculosis potentially kill more people than AIDS
• AIDS receives a quarter of global health aid even though it causes only 5% of the burden of disease in poor and middle-income countries.

When I was a co-editor of Melbourne University’s student paper Farrago in 2004, I wrote an article about an organisation, Alive and Well, whose members are in denial that HIV is the global killer we have come to see it as today. I interviewed the founders of Alive and Well, Christine Maggiore, and it was interesting and inspiring to see her take on HIV and what it meant for individuals living with the disease. She discussed how people with HIV lived perfectly healthy lives and that many never develop AIDS. At the time, Alive and Well also had the support of bands like the Foo Fighters, which gave it global recognition and hence alerted me to its cause. The article was written for our launch edition and was exactly the kind of issues I wanted to delve into during my stint as editor.

If the messages in the above are anything to go by, it looks like people’s opinions and, certainly, facts and research about AIDS are changing. Is it possible that AIDS isn’t the global pandemic we once thought it was? Perhaps we should be looking to a new approach for education and research, rather than focusing on the antiquated notions stemmed from the original Grim Reaper advertisements of the 1980’s.

When I was at school in the late 1990’s, I was always taught to greatly fear AIDS: that this one was the only one to be scared of, that basically your life was over if you contracted it, that you would probably give it to everyone around you, and that it was everywhere. Considering the climate of today’s AIDS debates, it seems that this may not be the way society thinks anymore. However, there is always a danger in complacency, so society must work to find a balance if and when there can ever be any kind of consensus about what this disease means, where it came from and where it is going.