TheStar.com – Africa’s AIDS pandemic: Steven Lewis writes: “I’ve been doing that job for something more 3 1/2 years, and I was at the International AIDS conference in Bangkok (in July, 2004) , listening carefully and absorbing a number of unmistakable truths about the weight and force of the pandemic.
Number 1, that the spread is irreversible. The assumption that a great many people, among them notable epidemiologists, made that somehow we would contain this pandemic in a relatively brief period of time has not come to pass. The most dramatic rise in the prevalence rates are today in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine,where a combination of drug use on the one hand and heterosexual activity on the other, is emerging as a kind of Hecate’s brew of horror. It is implanted deeply in Haiti and Jamaica and the Dominic Republic and other parts of the Caribbean and Central America. There are profound pockets of grief in Brazil and Argentina and Chili and Peru. No western country is exempt.”