She is two years old--her head is nearly the size of her belly, and her arms and legs are atrophied to lumps of a soft jelly-like mass. Mucous is caked over her face and when she coughs, a deep, rich purple substance oozes from her nose. Her eyes, a brown so intense they seem black, are crusted and glazed over, her gaze is unfixed--staring at nothing or at everything, I cannot tell. She cannot even cry properly, unable to reach into her chest for a mighty wail, she whimpers pathetically through the top of her throat. The disproportion of her head, potbelly, and limbs would be endearing if it weren't such a devastating symbol of how the virus has already ravaged her small, frail body.
I try to capture some meaning to Posiza's short life--but am unable to produce anything about the child that would set her apart from the millions of other AIDS orphans in Africa. I cannot resign her to just another poor, dying African child. But there is nothing of consequence to distinguish my relationship with Posiza from every other woman in Africa who holds onto a dying child, enraged by the injustice of its impending death, questioning everything she once seemed to know. And it is this commonness which has jaded the world to Posiza's situation, we accept that African children die by the thousands each day, we wouldn't expect anything else.
Posiza is one of the 40 million Africans whose life is held at the will of international apathy, political rhetoric and corporate greed. Although AIDS claims more lives in Africa than famine, war and flooding, there is no sense of urgency, from within Africa or the international community, to conquer this disease.
The AIDS epidemic in Africa, and throughout the world, should be declared an international emergency. It should be treated with the same sense of urgency as the war on terror--a war on AIDS has a tangible enemy and clear, quantifiable objectives, and while not an uncomplicated battle to fight, is essential to preventing political, economic and social catastrophe. If we do not take decisive action now, the opportunity which may have already passed will definitely go by. It already is a retroactive battle--when 40 million Africans are already infected, it can be nothing else.
Some African nations face predictions that up to one-quarter of their populations will die from complications of AIDS--something that the World Bank considers an imminent threat to economic and political instability. But instead of recognizing the threat AIDS poses to an already fragile Africa, and to international security by treating the epidemic as an international emergency, measures to combat the virus are stagnated by bureaucracy and political exploitation.
Consider the $15 billion in U.S. aid President Bush has pledged to fight AIDS in Africa. As the President demonstrated by asking for an extra $87 billion for the rebuilding of Iraq and continuing the war on terrorism, the resources necessary to undertake serious action on multiple fronts against a complicated and embittered enemy in a limited region of the world are enormous. All of a sudden, $15 billion pledged to an entire continent, over a five year period, does not seem like so much.
Even if it were enough, and by some miracle abstinence-only education defied itself and actually became an effective way of preventing the spread of HIV (and there were no use for the family planning programs the Bush administration is currently shutting down), by the time the bureaucratic channels are in place to implement the programs the Bush administration will create (no, using existing programs and infrastructure is not practical), the AIDS trend in Africa will most likely have reversed. This is simply because the number of potentially infected Africans will have reached its capacity.
And now the World Trade Organization is demonstrating its show of good faith as well, having reached an agreement between pharmaceutical companies and developing nations about compulsory licensing in Cancun conference on the Doha Development Plan that concluded recently. They have decided to allow countries who produce generic versions of antiretroviral drugs to export them to countries who can neither afford the name-brand kind nor have the capability to produce their own generics. And this after only 20 months of negotiations (and a much longer period just to get the parties at the table), during which only several million Africans died in want of the life-saving drugs in question. And still, the drugs will not be free, and many Africans will still not be able to afford or get access to them.
Neither of these acts of goodwill will mean anything to Posiza, who with one dose of nevirapine during her mother's labor would have had a 60 percent to 80 percent chance of not contracting the virus at all. Posiza, along with many millions of Africans, will die before any of these new advances will become any way relevant to her. Africa has already been robbed of a great number of its people by the direct actions of the Western world, and now it will lose millions more to international inaction. What I could do for Posiza, and what the western world is doing for Africa, is too little, and too late.
Alicia Manning is a Trinity junior. Her column appears every third Monday.
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