Like It Is

That HIV/AIDS is a plague that is ravaging the African continent should be the biggest story in the world. Fellow human beings are dying not by the tens or the thousands, but by the millions. Whole families, entire generations. Yet it barely even makes the front page of the media.

33 teenagers were killed in a senseless shooting last week. A totally murderous tragedy. Everyone is shocked at such a loss of life. But people are dying EVERY DAY from HIV/AIDS – millions. There is no such shock and little interest. Considering that the disease is wrecking countries on the African continent. On the human tragedy scale, I’d say it ranks pretty high. But (with a few notable exceptions) it barely makes the news these days and where it does it is a struggle to keep it there. How can that be? AIDS is preventable in the West. Why aren’t we ensuring antiretroviral drugs get to these sufferers?

Journalist Stephanie Nolan’s book 28 - Stories of Aids in Africa has just been published and caught my attention today. This is a part excerpt from the Globe and Mail:

I know something about what makes news. In the fifteen years I have worked as a journalist, I have reported on some of the biggest stories in the world. I watched Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization move into the West Bank after making peace with Israel in the early 1990s. I saw tentative women venture out of their homes for the first time in five years as the Taliban lost their hold on Afghanistan. I watched Saddam Hussein’s army flee Baghdad in the face of an onslaught of U.S. Marines. There is an undeniable thrill that comes with being in the centre of the big story.

But nothing I was sent to cover anywhere in the world compared to what I saw AIDS doing in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet this story never made the news at all.

In 2003, I persuaded my editors at The Globe and Mail that we were missing something important. They did not yet share my conviction about the urgency of the story, but they were willing to let me try to tell it. I moved to Johannesburg and began what would turn out to be years of travel through the heart of the epidemic: the Swazi villages, the slums outside Durban, the highlands of Lesotho, the urban hospitals of Botswana. I found hundreds and hundreds of communities like Nkhotakota on the verge of disappearing. I knew people in North America who had been living with HIV for years, taking antiretroviral medication that does not cure AIDS but will keep a person with HIV healthy for decades. But no one in Africa had the drugs. No one was even talking about getting them the drugs. AIDS was a fully preventable illness at home. But in Africa, it was a plague, and people like Lillian Chandawili could do little but sit and watch its inexorable progression. And I began to wonder how this could be happening—how we could be letting this happen—almost entirely unremarked.

It’s a topsy-turvy world where we allow this to happen, because I’m sure it needn’t be like this.

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