World AIDS Day
I'm not sure what to write for World AIDS Day. It's one of those things for which there's both everything and nothing to say.
I suppose I'll start with statistics. Since 1981, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS. 40 million people worldwide are infected. 1.1 million Americans are HIV-positive, and 25% of them don’t know it. Another 40,000 become infected each year. In New York State alone, 7,600 people were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 2004 (the worst nationwide). The bulk comes from New York City, where approximately 1 in 70 has HIV. Obviously, some populations have sufferred from this epidemic more than others. When sorted by demographic, the HIV infection rates (from the NYC Department of Health) are especially alarming: 
Meanwhile, the disease rages across sub-Saharan Africa, where 24.5 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2005 - 2.7 million more than at the year's start. In 2006, 2 million people there died from AIDS. Altogether, 12 million children have lost their parents. The map to the right (borrowed from Wikipedia) shows the national HIV infection rates in Africa. In the face of so much illness, nothing I say seems worth it. But something has to be said.
So I will quote from a recent WHO report on how the migration of health care workers from poor countries to rich countries impacts the AIDS epidemic. It finds, unsurprisingly, that: "Shortages are most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, which has 11% of the world's population and 24% of the global burden of disease but only 3% of the world's health workers." Meanwhile, the United States and other Western countries - the countries most pro-active in AIDS funding, ironically - attract (and even recruit) health care workers from, yep, you guessed it, sub-Saharan Africa.
Why? Here's why, I think: "Better you than me."
Does it stand up?
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2 comments:
I guess one of the most prominent reasons to recruit health care workers from Africa is because they know their culture better and the common person(in Africa) would more easily relate to their message than to an outsider.
Also it could be taken as some form of employment
Hi Shalabh, good to hear from you.
I wasn't clear enough in my post.
I meant that the US is recruiting health workers in Africa TO COME TO THE UNITED STATES, even though their home countries in Africa are the ones that need them most. There are plenty of jobs for health workers there, so it's not like they have to come to the United States to find work.
By recruiting these workers to come to the US, we may be looking out for our own ailing population, but we're harming the AIDS patients in Africa who need these workers most. In the meantime, we're not helping to educate the doctors and nurses that we pull overseas. It's exploitative.
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