For long HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency virus)/AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was thought to be a disease of the West transmitted through 'deviant' practice. Then AIDS devastated Africa, especially its women and children, and it was suddenly not so obvious that 'deviant' practice had anything to do with it. But even so, it was thought to be an African disease, caused by the licentious conduct of African men. Orthodox South Asian values, it was assumed, would be a sufficient vaccine against the rampant virus. This unfortunate attitude still persists, with devastating consequences.
In the last decade, much has been written and spoken in the media about the disease and the havoc it wreaked and continues to wreak in Africa, without making any serious dent in the obtuse approach of policymakers within South Asia. It is, therefore, not surprising that a health crisis of unimaginable proportions looms over close to a billion and a half people, threatening to afflict some 25 million people, and hence directly affecting some 250 million who will have to live with the premature, painful and entirely avoidable sickness or death of at least one close relative. Of these, a minimum of a 100 million could be immediate financial dependents. Add extended family and friends and upwards of 500 million will be connected, in differing degrees of intimacy, to AIDS bereavement. This is more than one-third the population of the most populous and densely packed region of the world. These may be back-of-the-envelope calculations but, if anything, they perhaps err on the side of caution than of excess. There are better ways for a billion and a half people to learn about the imprudent causes and lethal consequences of a disease that can be prevented through more efficient and less debilitating means.
Factor in the statistic that HIV/AIDS primarily strikes the 15-40 age group, ie the group that is economically the most active and productive, and it becomes clear that the countries of the Subcontinent are staring uncomprehendingly at a social and economic crisis that will accelerate exponentially in the coming decade. All this for want of any official recognition of the need to seriously prevent the spread of a virus that has so relentlessly announced it presence through chilling statistics and tragic stories. Worse still, medical solutions are not about to come to the aid of negligent governments. All the recent attempts at developing a medical vaccine against HIV have come to nothing and the prospects are not encouraging.
The latest trials in February this year for a vaccine developed by the California biotech company VaxGen have failed. Even had VaxGen's efforts been successful, it would not have made much of a difference to South Asia, since medical research has concentrated on developing a vaccine for HIV subtype B, common in Europe and the US, while the strain prevalent in South Asia is subtype C. Under such circumstances, it takes remarkably dense polities to ignore a disease that could undermine South Asian society and bring it to the brink of implosion. Unfortunately, in public health matters at least, the polities are indeed remarkably dense, else we would not have been witness to the neglect of a decade and a half and the persistence of the gung-ho denials that characterise state reactions to prognostications of the coming crisis.