Re:Violence and Patents (Score 2, Informative)

Yes, the AIDS pandemic in Africa is all to do with those swarthy Africans and their ravenous sexual appetites...

Of course, according to a UNAIDS overview there are two million children in sub-Saharan africa living with HIV or AIDS; The "vast majority of children who are infected with HIV" are infected via Mother-to-child transmission or through contact with infected blood or unsterilised needles. The WHO estimates that unsafe blood transfusions result in around 5-10% of new HIV infections, and according to Safe Blood for Africa around half of the 6,000,000 blood transfusions which take place in sub-Saharan Africa every year use blood not tested for infectious diseases. Are we to also disregard rape victims? According to estimates from the United Nations Population Fund, around two-thirds of the 60,000 women raped during the course of the Rwandan genocide may have been infected by AIDS. As per the previously cited article, the use of rape as a weapon of war is becoming more common and resources to help reduce infection rates in the immediate onset of rape are stretched.

Of course, education is a crucial factor in stemming the tide of the AIDS pandemic in Africa: programs dedicated to public education on AIDS in Uganda have helped raise awareness of the disease and that country has seen a steady decline in the rate of new infections in the past decade. However, the argument that education is the only route to wiping out the pandemic is terribly vacuous.

Public education projects will consistently fail unless accompanied by a systematic response to institutional weaknesses: Efforts to improve transfusion safety, the state of hygiene and nutrition and, yes, medication. A leaflet on abstinence will not save children infected through mother-to-child transmission, but antiretroviral drugs can help treat their disease and prevent the ravages of AIDS from carrying on from generation to generation.