Time to face the facts about AIDS in Yemen

The HIV virus is old news in the west. The number of people living with HIV/AIDS is still dramatically increasing in western countries, but the subject is far from new and it no longer holds most people’s interest. Americans dying horrible deaths caused by what the World Health Organization considers to be one of the most destructive pandemics in recorded history doesn’t even belong in the back pages of respectable American newspapers.  

Since the virus began carving away at western populations, people have talked about it until they were blue in the face, articles and books have been written about it, Hollywood films have been made about it, then sequels to those films were made, pop songs have been sung about it, and national monuments have been erected in memory of its victims. 

The average westerner is quite knowledgeable about the disease—how it is contracted, it’s effects on the human body, etc. etc. Their knowledge even includes a small list of celebrities who have been infected with HIV.  But knowing those facts doesn’t mean that they take every protective measure available to avoid contracting the virus.  It continues to ravage even the wealthiest and most well informed nations.

Today, only seven countries in the world have more citizens living with HIV than the United States.  

It appears that public awareness is not an adequate means of curbing infection rates.  And now that Yemen is facing the onslaught of the HIV virus, we can only pray for mercy—or widespread impotence. But what familiarity with the subject does achieve is the dismantling of misperceptions about HIV and the prejudices against those who live with it.

Middle Eastern countries haven’t yet discussed the subject as comprehensively as western nations, and Yemen is especially far behind in acknowledging and determining the severity of the country’s AIDS epidemic. It is an absolute imperative for the Yemeni government to mobilize hospitals, development organizations, social groups, religious leaders, and schools to work together against the profound ignorance surrounding this crisis that we face.  

Until a cure is found, there may be no chance of eradicating the virus or even slowing its spread.  Even in the U.S., the best people with HIV can hope for is to live for a number of years, or sometimes decades if they can afford expensive antiretroviral drugs.  But what Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries can do, which the west has already begun, is to disseminate correct information about the disease.  

African refugees and homosexuals are not the cause of Yemen’s AIDS epidemic, contrary to what many Yemenis seem to believe.  No one is.  It is a transmittable disease that can be spread by anybody from any background. And among those who live with it and die from it are mothers and fathers, doctors and lawyers, teachers and poets….  

We must respect the men and women who live with HIV as we respect those of us who do not because it is a tragic affliction that no one deserves.

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