Born To Be Miserable

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Here is some recent compiled research exerpts about what is being done in Africa about AIDS...


Hey dude - I want you to play fair - or else!!
 Bill Gates, from Bay Village, Ohio became known as a US government antagonist when he and his then wife Melinda were in Algeria racketeering AIDS victims and did not then bring humanitarian aid.  Below are recent articles written about what is going on in African countries to help now.  There are many Africans in Columbus, Ohio from all countries of Africa who are interested in this topic.  Gates was a well known person at the time, and this old behaviour could be a reason for African unrest in the United States in certain areas.

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1.  Source:Economist; 5/11/2002, Vol. 363 Issue 8272, p25-27, 3p, 3 Color Photographs, 1 Graph


Abstract:Examines the efforts of Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa to overcome AIDS. Support of Prime Minister Festus Mogae of Botswana for condoms and abstinence; Partnering of Botswana with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Reasons for the high rate of infection in Botswana, including the migrant-labor system; Efforts of Mozambique to introduce an anti-retroviral program and educate children about prevention; Use of anti-retrovirals in South Africa; Issue of the breakdown of family structure in these nations.

Source:Economist; 5/11/2002, Vol. 363 Issue 8272, p25-27, 3p, 3 Color Photographs, 1 Graph


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NAICS/Industry Codes:525120 Health and Welfare Funds

2.  Abstract:Examines the efforts of Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa to overcome AIDS. Support of Prime Minister Festus Mogae of Botswana for condoms and abstinence; Partnering of Botswana with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Reasons for the high rate of infection in Botswana, including the migrant-labor system; Efforts of Mozambique to introduce an anti-retroviral program and educate children about prevention; Use of anti-retrovirals in South Africa; Issue of the breakdown of family structure in these nations.
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AIDS in Africa


3.  The quest for an AIDS treatment that the poor world can afford may have to offend some rich-world sensibilities

Sep 25th 1997
from the print edition

FEW diseases have been as politicised as AIDS. And in few other cases is political correctness such a danger to the disease’s victims. In recent weeks, trials of a treatment designed to minimise the risk of mothers’ passing HIV on to their infants have been criticised ferociously. The New England Journal of Medicine has likened these trials to the grotesque “Tuskegee” experiments that started in the 1930s, when poor black Americans infected with syphilis were deliberately left untreated. Many demand that the new research be stopped. Strong as their case may seem, they are wrong.

The story begins three years ago, with one of the first significant breakthroughs in the fight against HIV. When pregnant women with HIV were fed the drug zidovudine (more popularly known as AZT), the likelihood that they would pass the virus on to their babies fell from one in four to one in 12. But the regimen is complex and expensive, and therefore beyond the reach of the majority of women who risk infecting their infants with AIDS. Most of these women live in poor countries. In some such countries, nearly one pregnant woman in three carries HIV. Transmission from the mother—during pregnancy, delivery or breast feeding—is the leading cause of AIDS among children. Finding a treatment that might be applicable in these countries is therefore of the highest importance. But how?

In the trials that have caused such controversy, groups of women are being given various experimental treatments. In time-honoured fashion, their progress is being compared with control groups of women who are not receiving it. But here is the difficulty. In the rich world, the control groups would consist of women receiving the best existing alternative, in order for researchers to determine whether the new treatment offered any improvement over the old one. In the trials at issue, the women in the control groups are receiving a placebo. That is, they are receiving no treatment at all.

Add to this the fact that the trials are being paid for in America, but conducted in Africa, and you may think you have the ingredients of a scandal. Since no American woman with AIDS would knowingly take a placebo when a reasonably effective alternative was already available, why should any woman in Africa have to? The answer is simple, and cruel. In many poor parts of the world, the existing drug is at present too expensive to use. So the relevant question is not whether a new treatment is better than the existing alternative, but whether it is better than no treatment. That, rightly, is what the trials have been designed to discover.

To be sure, human subjects in clinical trials everywhere are vulnerable to abuse. In poor countries, where the standard of education is liable to be lower, and where doctors may wield undue power and authority, the danger is greater. There is a case for extra vigilance to protect the interests and rights of the participants in clinical trials. Without question, any woman involved in such a trial should be a volunteer who understands that she may be a member of the control group, and that she may therefore be given a placebo instead of a real medicine.

Nothing could be more natural than to sympathise with the plight of women who are infected with HIV, pregnant, and therefore liable to pass the virus on to their unborn children. The notion of doing nothing to help them is repugnant. But the repugnant fact of AIDS is that the promising drug therapies now becoming available are still far too expensive for poor countries to afford. The trials in Africa are an attempt to help. It would be mad to stop them simply in order to give people in the rich world more peace of mind.
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4.  Aiding Africa


SIR – The manic frenzy about increasing aid to Africa seems grossly out of proportion (“The $25 billion question”, July 2nd). As donor countries have closed their key trade and labour markets, depriving developing countries of $500 billion a year to earn their own way in the world, aid expenditures probably have a greater net benefit to donor economies. Returning a fraction of that loss as aid assuages guilt and provides the means for continued interference in the developing world.

Moreover, aid in the recipient countries merely restores a tiny fraction of what is misappropriated from exchequers by local politicians and governments. Africa experiences capital flight of up to $90 billion a year and the external stock of capital held by Africa's political elites is $700 billion-800 billion. Along with missing billions in export earnings from oil, gas, diamonds and other minerals that are not openly accounted for, it then becomes unclear if Africa suffers from a poverty trap because of a lack of money.
A closer look at Africa's human-resource and immigration policies and the way in which African governments have driven out human capital that they desperately need because it happens to be visibly non-African, may provide a more meaningful, if politically incorrect, answer to what ails Africa than aid.
Percy Mistry
Oxford International Group
Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire
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A correlated current issue that may have to do with unrest in regard to AIDS in Africa has to do with US policy in regard to strip mining which depleted diamonds from African countries, and oil.  Minneapolis, Minnesota now has a group of United States black dissidents who dress in Somalian clothes to be part of the African OPEC or Clark Oil industry.to become rich.  Clark Oil has no grant funding available for any purpose.  This is another conglomerate issue whereas the people who are part of massive wealth need to be responsible.

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Hello! I am a Social Worker (since 1990) and a writer. I am seeking writing jobs, funding for my Writing business called "the Indigo Drum" and a way to run an office again, plus a car.