Everybody Got AIDS - UMKC
Everybody Got AIDS
AIDS Increasing 2
SSA Got AIDS 3-4
AIDS Kill Millions 5
AIDS Cause Extinction 6-7
AIDS Causes Infectious Disease 8
Infectious Disease Spread Impacts 9
AIDS Collapse Global Economy 10
AIDS Hurts Economic Growth 11-14
AIDS Cause Economic Decline 15
AIDS Hurts Development 16
AIDS Causes Poverty 17-18
Aids Root Cause Of Poverty 19
Poverty Hurts Public Health 20
Poverty Causes Conflict 21
AIDS Guts Education 22
AIDS Cause Nuclear War 23
AIDS Causes War 24-25
AIDS Cause Civil War 26
AIDS Causes Terrorism 27-28
AIDS Causes Failed States 29
AIDS Causes Genocide 30
AIDS Collapse Healthcare Infrastructure 31
AIDS Cause Orphans 32
AIDS Causes Food Shortages 33
AIDS Destroys Agriculture 34
AIDS Creates Gender Hierarchies 35
AIDS Causes Malaria 36
AIDS Causes TB Spread 37
AIDS Should Be Security Issue 38
***Mutations*** 39
AIDS Can Mutate 40-41
AIDS Goes Airborne 42
Disease Mutation Cause Extinction 43
War Causes AIDS Mutations 44
AIDS Will Not Mutate 45
Aids Not Go Airborne 46
***Refugees*** 47
AIDS Not Cause Refugess 48
Refugees Spread AIDS 49
Refugees Not Spread AIDS 50
AIDS Not Cause Extinction 51
***AIDS Answers*** 52
AIDS Exaggerated 53
AIDS Not Cause Extinction 54
AIDS Not A Killer 55
AIDS Not Cause Failed States 55
AIDS Not Cause War 57
***Alt Causes*** 58
Poverty Causes AIDS 59
AIDS Increasing
AIDS shows signs of slowing down
Joe De Capua [reporter] June 14, 2007(“World Bank report Says AIDS Epidemic Beginning to Slow in Many Parts of Africa,” Voice of America News, July 23, 2007, lexis-nexis, GB)
The World Bank says the mobilization of grassroots communities, condoms and anti-retroviral drugs is "beginning to slow the pace of Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic." The disease killed more than two million adults and children on the continent last year. The World bank has released a new report to assess its billion-dollar program set-up in 2000 " The Africa Multi-Country AIDS Program. It says besides better prevention, care and treatment, positive changes are being made in what it calls "social immune systems." That is, people changing their beliefs, perceptions and behavior regarding HIV/AIDS. Phil Hay is a senior bank advisor on hand for the release of the report in Kigali. "This new report, which we launched in Rwanda, was going back over the last six years and basically says what did a billion dollars buy? Now the mission of that program is to dramatically increase access to HIV prevention, care and treatment programs, with the whole idea of stopping the transmission of mother-to-child spread of the disease, especially looking after AIDS orphans," he says. The report says signs the epidemic is slowing can be seen in Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe, as well as urban Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and Zambia. However, the report notes that Southern Africa "remains the epicenter of Africa's epidemic with unprecedented infection rates." The goal of the World Bank's Multi-Country AIDS Program is to offer "long term support to any country with a sound HIV/AIDS strategy and action plan." Hay says, "The country's voice is the unmistakable voice of authenticity. So, the bank is prepared to come in and help countries with their AIDS fighting efforts, but the country, as a down payment in a way, has to show it's serious. And a declaration of that seriousness is by coming up with its own plan."
AIDS is on the rise and doesn’t seem to be stopping
Craig Timberg [reporter] June 20, 2007(“Spread of AIDS in Africa Is Outpacing Treatment,” The Washington Post, July 23, 2007 lexis-nexis, GB)
The problem is not the medicine, which is among the most powerful in the world. In places such as the United States and Europe, where prevention programs were already succeeding against much smaller epidemics, the arrival of antiretroviral drugs was a turning point in the battle against AIDS. But in sub-Saharan Africa, prevention programs have mostly failed to curb the behavior -- especially the habit of maintaining several sexual partners at a time -- that drives the epidemic, research indicates. So while antiretroviral drugs have prolonged and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans, millions more are being newly infected with a disease that is still incurable and, for most, terminal. In South Africa, AIDS deaths are projected to increase at least through 2025 despite steadily improving access to antiretrovirals, according to the Actuarial Society of South Africa. The prognosis on the rest of the continent is at least as bleak. Global health officials and AIDS activists once predicted that expanding treatment would bolster prevention efforts by encouraging more openness about the disease and making it easier to educate people on how to protect themselves from HIV. But among African countries with the most serious AIDS epidemics, the only one to report a recent drop in HIV rates is Zimbabwe, which has one of the region's smallest treatment programs. In neighboring South Africa, attention has shifted from attempting to prevent new infections to treating existing ones, said Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, an anthropologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a director of one of South Africa's largest AIDS organizations. In meetings, she said, maybe 10 minutes is spent discussing prevention for every hour focused on treatment.
SSA Got AIDS
25 million are infected in sub-Saharan Africa
Second Annual Report to Congress PEPFAR “ACTION TODAY, A FOUNDATION FOR TOMORROW: The President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief” 2006
Preying upon our most innate of drives — reproduction — HIV threatens to depopulate the globe the way the Black Death did Europe 650 years ago. Globally, 38 million people are infected with HIV, with 25 million living in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2003, nearly five million people were infected with HIV worldwide — three million in sub-Saharan Africa. This represents the highest yearly infection rate since the beginning of the HIV pandemic — sobering evidence that we have not yet begun to effectively control this plague. While sub-Saharan Africa remains the epicenter of HIV infection, with four southern African countries experiencing adult infection rates over 30 percent (Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland), evidence indicates that in the near future, the focus will shift eastward toward the population behemoths of China and India, and northward into Eastern Europe and Russia.
120 million will be infected by 2030
Manly Daily, March 31, 2007,
WHEN global mortality projections were last calculated a decade ago, researchers were under the assumption that the number of AIDS cases would be declining. Instead, they are on the rise. Currently trailing fourth as a leading cause of death behind heart disease, stroke and respiratory infections, AIDS is on track to become No 3, according to researchers in a new report in the Public Library of Science's Medicine journal. Close to 40 million people are infected with HIV worldwide and AIDS accounts for about 2.8 million deaths every year, although figures are expected to approach 120 million by 2030. "HIV is a complex infection that affects the very heart of one's immune system, and slowly causes deterioration of the immune system," said Dr Stephen Davies, a physician at the Sexual Health Clinic in Manly, a suburb where the numbers of those affected was reasonably low. "The consequences of that can be illness almost anywhere in the body. All the major systems of the body can be affected by it and the vast majority of untreated patients are going to progress and develop one or more serious illnesses that doctors call AIDS."
Aids will kill 97 million people by 2015 without action taken
Dr. Rene Loewenson (Director, Training and Research Support Centre in Zimbabwe) and Professor Alan Whiteside (Director of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at University of Natal South Africa) 2001 “HIV/AIDS Implications for Poverty Reduction”, UNITED NATIONS DEVELPMENT PROGRAMME POLICY PAPER, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
However, despite intensifying efforts focused on prevention and care, the epidemic continues to spread unabatedly, and as people infected by HIV become ill and die, its devastating impact is now being felt in the worst affected countries. Assuming that life-prolonging treatment will not be universally available in poor countries ‘overnight’, death rates from AIDS will continue to soar before leveling off. Recent estimates from the UN Population Division show that the population of the 45 most affected countries will be 97 million smaller in 2015 than it would have been in the absence of HIV/AIDS. Most of this loss is due to sharp increases in mortality among young adults. In the absence of national and global action to mitigate the developmental impact of HIV/AIDS, households, communities and civil society organizations will continue to bear the brunt of this tragic disaster. They are at the front lines of coping with the impact of HIV/AIDS, responding directly to the needs of people and often working with little government support. Communities are mobilizing themselves, showing great resilience and solidarity, despite their vulnerability to external shocks such as premature death of their most productive members.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 60% of all AIDS cases
Dr. Robert Rothberg (Harvard Medical School) 2007 AFRICA: PROGRESS & PROBLEMS -- AIDS & HEALTH ISSUES, , p. 14
While AIDS has spread across the globe since the first cases were identified in the early 1980s, the people of Africa – particularly sub-Saharan Africa – have clearly suffered the most. Of the more than 25 million lives lost worldwide to the AIDS pandemic by 2005, approximately 17 million were Africans, the majority from countries south of the Sahara Desert. Sub-Saharan Africans accounted for some 25.8 million of the estimated 40.3 million people living with HIV, according to the AIDS Epidemic Update published in December of 2005 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UN AIDS). Although Sub-Saharan Africa contains only about 10 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for more than 60 percent of all HIV/AIDS cases.
SSA Got AIDS
SSA is the epicenter of the HIV/AIDS disaster
Madre Position Paper, Patent Rights Over Human Rights: African Women and US AIDS Policy, 2007
Patent Rights Over Human Rights: African Women and US AIDS Policy Thanks largely to the work of African public-health and social-justice advocates, growing numbers of people around the world know that sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic: the majority of AIDS deaths worldwide are in Africa, where 20 million people have already died and nearly two-thirds of the world’s HIV-positive people live. Fewer people know that most Africans living with HIV/AIDS are women, and that young women are now being infected at a rate three to four times higher than young men. For many, this information is absorbed through a mesh of stereotypes that make human misery seem like a natural condition of life in Africa.
Millions of people are living with HIV/AIDS and the number is quickly increasing.
Joanne Mariner, “Drug Patents, Corporate Profits, andAids Deaths” November 26th, 2003 (accessed July 10th, 2007)
In their vulnerability to treatable diseases, the rich and the poor live in different worlds. Every year, millions of people in developing countries die of illnesses that they would likely have survived had they lived in Europe or the United States. A key factor in the enormous global disparities in death rates is poor peoples' lack of access to needed drugs. Consider the case of HIV/AIDS. An estimated 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, 39 million of them in the developing world. India alone has at least 4.5 million people who are HIV-positive, and possibly many more. In the United States and other rich countries, since the advent of anti-retroviral drug treatment, AIDS has become a manageable disease, not a death sentence. But for the millions living with HIV in the developing world, prospects for effective treatment remain dim. At present, only a tiny minority of HIV-positive people in poor countries have access to anti-retroviral drugs. For the others, as well as some marginalized populations in rich countries, the cost of treatment remains prohibitively high.
AIDS is ravaging Africa, is must be stopped at all costs to avoid the death of millions.
Robert Rotberg and Victoria Salinas, “Needed: A Medical Peace Corps” Boston Globe May 10th, 2005
AS ANGOLANS die piteously of Marburg virus and Africans everywhere suffer from HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and a host of other killers, too little attention is paid to the desperate nature of Africa's routine health services. Just as most African governments provide too few doses of antiretroviral medicines to their HIV populations at risk, so most African nations are far too poor to afford more than the bare rudiments of medical care. The wealthy healthy world must do far more for Africa, where every statistic reveals how fundamentally neglected Africans are.
AIDS Kill Millions
Aids will kill 71 million by 2010 without action taken
Dr. Rene Loewenson (Director, Training and Research Support Centre in Zimbabwe) and Professor Alan Whiteside (Director of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at University of Natal South Africa) 2001 “HIV/AIDS Implications for Poverty Reduction”, UNITED NATIONS DEVELPMENT PROGRAMME POLICY PAPER, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
Increased deaths, fewer births and reduced fertility will slow or reverse population growth. Sub-Saharan Africa will have 71 million fewer people by 2010 because of AIDS, and populations may start contracting by 2003 in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The increase in widows, widowers and orphans will increase dependency. The number of orphans will rise from two to up to ten in every hundred children. By 2010, about 40 million children worldwide will have been orphaned by the epidemic.
50 million will die by 2020
Nicolas Cook Congressional Research Service, AIDS IN AFRICA, May 5, 2006
Based on aggregate estimates, about 27.5 million Africans have died of AIDS since 1982 at the start of the epidemic, including about 2.4 million or more in 2005. UNAIDS has projected that between 2000 and 2020, 55 million Africans will likely have lost their lives to AIDS, which has surpassed malaria as the leading cause of death in Africa and kills many times more people than Africa’s armed conflicts
AIDS will kill 100 million in Africa
Terry Leonard (Staff Writer) 2006 “AIDS epidemic hits 25 years” Wilmington Star, June 6,
It began innocuously, when a statistical anomaly pointed to a mysterious syndrome that attacked the immune systems of gay men in California. No one imagined 25 years ago that AIDS would become the deadliest epidemic in history. Since June 5, 1981, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has killed more than 25 million people, infected 40 million others and left a legacy of unspeakable loss, hardship, fear and despair. Its spread was hastened by ignorance, prejudice, denial and the freedoms of the sexual revolution. Along the way from oddity to pandemic, AIDS changed the way people live and love. Slowed but unchecked, the epidemic's relentless march has established footholds in the world's most populous countries. Advances in medicine and prevention that have made the disease manageable in the developed world haven't reached the rest. In the worst case, sub-Saharan Africa, it has been devastating. And the next 25 years of AIDS promise to be deadlier than the first. AIDS could kill 31 million people in India and 18 million in China by 2025, according to projections by U.N. population researchers. By then in Africa, where AIDS likely began and where the virus has wrought the most devastation, researchers said the toll could reach 100 million. "It is the worst and deadliest epidemic that humankind has ever experienced," said Mark Stirling, the director of East and Southern Africa for UNAIDS.
AIDS Cause Extinction
AIDS causes extinction, sub-Saharan Africa is only the starting point **Gender Paraphrased**
Michael Kibaara Muchiri (Staff Member at Ministry of Education in Nairobi) 2000 “Will Annan finally put out Africa’s fires?” Jakarta Post; March 6; L/N
The executive director of UNAIDS, Peter Piot, estimated that Africa would annually need between $ 1 billion to $ 3 billion to combat the disease, but currently receives only $ 160 million a year in official assistance. World Bank President James Wolfensohn lamented that Africa was losing teachers faster than they could be replaced, and that AIDS was now more effective than war in destabilizing African countries. Statistics show that AIDS is the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing people killed in warfare. In 1998, 200,000 people died from armed conflicts compared to 2.2 million from AIDS. Some 33.6 million people have HIV around the world, 70 percent of them in Africa, thereby robbing countries of their most productive members and decimating entire villages. About 13 million of the 16 million people who have died of AIDS are in Africa, according to the UN. What barometer is used to proclaim a holocaust if this number is not a sure measure? There is no doubt that AIDS is the most serious threat to humankind, more serious than hurricanes, earthquakes, economic crises, capital crashes or floods. It has no cure yet. We are watching a whole continent degenerate into ghostly skeletons that finally succumb to a most excruciating, dehumanizing death. Gore said that his new initiative, if approved by the U.S. Congress, would bring U.S. contributions to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases to $ 325 million. Does this mean that the UN Security Council and the U.S. in particular have at last decided to remember Africa? Suddenly, AIDS was seen as threat to world peace, and Gore would ask the congress to set up millions of dollars on this case. The hope is that Gore does not intend to make political capital out of this by painting the usually disagreeable Republican-controlled Congress as the bad guy and hope the buck stops on the whole of current and future U.S. governments' conscience. Maybe there is nothing left to salvage in Africa after all and this talk is about the African-American vote in November's U.S. presidential vote. Although the UN and the Security Council cannot solve all African problems, the AIDS challenge is a fundamental one in that it threatens to wipe out [humanity] man. The challenge is not one of a single continent alone because Africa cannot be quarantined. The trouble is that AIDS has no cure -- and thus even the West has stakes in the AIDS challenge. Once sub-Saharan Africa is wiped out, it shall not be long before another continent is on the brink of extinction. Sure as death, Africa's time has run out, signaling the beginning of the end of the black race and maybe the human race.This evidence is gender modified.
Ultimately, failure to check AIDS will result in human extinction
Dr. Veljko, Veljkovich 1999 “The Perspective of HIV on the Last Days of the Millenium”,
We are approaching the end of this millennium and people worldwide are occupied with summation of the succession which we are leaving for the next 1000 years. Unfortunately our most important succession for the next few generations is AIDS, which in worse case, could quite very well lead to the extinction of the human population from this planet. Based on this tragic succession the next few generations might remember us as primitive, selfish and stupid ancestors which are guilty for their pain and death. They certainly will not be able to understand our spending of energy, time and money at the end of this millenium in permanent fight for personal and national domination and profit ignoring presence of the common enemy starting to eliminate the human population from Earth. In existing euphoric atmosphere in which people are expecting the New 2000 the above apocalyptic picture very probably will be considered as exaggeration of desperate scientist. Unfortunately the following facts inexorably support this dark prediction: Epidemic: AIDS epidemic is significantly accelerated with tendency in the next few decades to cause extinction of the whole nations in Africa. According to the recent WHO report the demographic explosion first time is significantly slowed down by AIDS. Opportunistic infections: Immunosupresion caused by HIV allowed evolution of the coinfecting pathogens toward new more aggressive forms which are resistant to the existing therapy. The most dangerous is the multi drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis. This new version of an old pathogen is on the right way to return us in the XIX century when tuberculosis was an incurable illness.
AIDS causes extinction.
Africa News 2007 (Daily Trust; Nigeria; HIV/AIDS: The Possible Way Out; June 2, 2007 Saturday; l/n)
HIV/AIDS is real and has no cure; infected persons are death bound. Looking at this danger gives me fear for being biological killer of human race to speed off man to extinction. It is worthy to note that the anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs used are only to help to reduce the load of the virus known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) when the infection is detected in the body at an early stage. ARV drugs have little or no effect when the disease is fully blown to the late stage of what is called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
AIDS Cause Extinction
AIDS risk Extinction
The Day “HIV/Aids . . . Saving Children, Mothers From the Scourge”, April 3, 2007,
Despite various efforts being made by different groups including governments and non-governmental agencies to checkmate the spread of the Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV), emerging statistics of the pandemic is frightening as it keeps increasing by the day. For instance, by the end of 2005, according to WHO reports, there were estimated 2.9 million people living with HIV and Aids in the country. This is the largest number in the world, after India and South Africa. From the first case discovered in 1986, the prevalence level rose from 1.8 per cent in 1988 to 5.8 per cent in 2001. By 2003, there were 3.3 million adults living with the virus in the country and 1.9 million or 57 per cent of that figure were women. The report further showed that over 13 of Nigeria's 36 states had an HIV prevalence of over five per cent and at 5.6 per cent; HIV prevalence is highest among young people between ages 20 and 24 compared with other age groups. Surprisingly, at the outbreak of the pandemic in 1982, the initial argument was about the source, whether it was from African monkeys or some mentally debased scientist somewhere in the western world. However, the issue of where it emerged from is no longer the issue, as various bodies have come to agreement that HIV as a health issue is not only real but is determined to wipe off the human race. Increasing number of people worldwide is infected and is falling sick, being exposed to physical, emotional and spiritual crisis. It has not been discreet in its impact. Men, women, young people, children, professionals, politicians, are infected and are down with illness and dying, families, churches, businesses, communities, especially in poverty stricken situations are severely impoverished and incapacitated. The effects of HIV/Aids is breaking people's hearts and spirits, all these point out to the fact that HIV/Aids is real and humanity are strongly feeling its presence in all aspects of our daily lives.
Unchecked AIDS epidemic risks human extinction
Mathiu 2000 (Mutuma, Africa News, July 15, lexis)
Every age has its killer. But Aids is without precedent. It is comparable only to the Black Death of the Middle Ages in the terror it evokes and the graves it fills. But unlike the plague, Aids does not come at a time of scientific innocence: It flies in the face of space exploration, the manipulation of genes and the mapping of the human genome. The Black Death - the plague, today easily cured by antibiotics and prevented by vaccines - killed a full 40 million Europeans, a quarter of the population of Europe, between 1347 and 1352. But it was a death that could be avoided by the simple expedient of changing addresses and whose vector could be seen and exterminated. With Aids, the vector is humanity itself, the nice person in the next seat in the bus. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Every human being who expresses the innate desire to preserve the human genetic pool through the natural mechanism of reproduction is potentially at risk. And whereas death by plague was a merciful five days of agony, HIV is not satisfied until years of stigma and excruciating torture have been wrought on its victim. The plague toll of tens of millions in two decades was a veritable holocaust, but it will be nothing compared to the viral holocaust: So far, 18.8 million people are already dead; 43.3 million infected worldwide (24.5 million of them Africans) carry the seeds of their inevitable demise - unwilling participants in a March of the Damned. Last year alone, 2.8 million lives went down the drain, 85 per cent of them African; as a matter of fact, 6,000 Africans will die today. The daily toll in Kenya is 500. There has never been fought a war on these shores that was so wanton in its thirst for human blood. During the First World War, more than a million lives were lost at the Battle of the Somme alone, setting a trend that was to become fairly common, in which generals would use soldiers as cannon fodder; the lives of 10 million young men were sacrificed for a cause that was judged to be more worthwhile than the dreams - even the mere living out of a lifetime - of a generation. But there was proffered an explanation: It was the honour of bathing a battlefield with young blood, patriotism or simply racial pride. Aids, on the other hand, is a holocaust without even a lame or bigoted justification. It is simply a waste. It is death contracted not in the battlefield but in bedrooms and other venues of furtive intimacy. It is difficult to remember any time in history when the survival of the human race was so hopelessly in jeopardy.
AIDS Causes Infectious Disease
If left unchecked the spread of HIV/AIDS will increase and contribute to the spread of disease globally the risk extinction. We have a moral obligation to prevent such atrocities
Susan Hunter (an independent consultant to certain agencies of the United Nations) 2003 BLACK DEATH: AIDS IN AFRICA, p. 9
By taking a closer, more reasoned look at why Africa has failed to develop as a continent, we can understand the future of AIDS on other continents. Africa is only the worst case of an inhumane scenario being played out in other regions of the world to the detriment of the human species as a whole. The growing wealth of developed countries over the past two centuries and the growing impoverishment of developing regions are inescapably related. The deprivation that limits the lives of one in every five human beings on the planet creates a burden of moral responsibility not only to give back, but to think about a strategy that yields a safer and saner world for the children of every country in the twenty-first century. As HIV/AIDS and other epidemic diseases increase, they are creating a huge disease reservoir that threatens the very existence of humankind. One of the most important evolutionary relationships is between humans and their microbes, and many scientists feel that because of fundamental neglect of the needs of 20 percent of the human race, the microbes are winning.
Global disease spread places the human race at risk of extinction
John D. Steinbruner (Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution) Winter, 1997/1998 “Biological weapons: A plague upon all houses,” FOREIGN POLICY, Accessed 5/17/2007, (199724%2F199824)109%3C85%3ABWAPUA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J
It is a considerable comfort and undoubtedly a key to our survival that, so far, the main lines of defense against this threat have not depended on explicit policies or organized efforts. In the long course of evolution, the human body has developed physical barriers and a biochemical immune system whose sophistication and effectiveness exceed anything we could design or as yet even fully understand. But evolution is a sword that cuts both ways: New diseases emerge, while old diseases mutate and adapt. Throughout history, there have been epidemics during which human immunity has broken down on an epic scale. An infectious agent believed to have been the plague bacterium killed an estimated 20 million people over a four-year period in the fourteenth century, including nearly one-quarter of Western Europe's population at the time. Since its recognized appearance in 1981, some 20 variations of the HIVvirus have infected an estimated 29.4 million worldwide, with 1.5 million people currently dying of aids each year. Malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera-once thought to be under control-are now making a comeback. As we enter the twenty-first century, changing conditions have enhanced the potential for widespread contagion. The rapid growth rate of the total world population, the unprecedented freedom of movement across international borders, and scientific advances that expand the capability for the deliberate manipulation of pathogens are all cause for worry that the problem might be greater in the future than it has ever been in the past. The threat of infectious pathogens is not just an issue of public health, but a fundamental security problem for the species as a whole.
Infectious Disease Spread Impacts
Left unchecked, infectious diseases will kill over 13 Million people every year
Mark Smolinski (Director of the Global Health and Security Initiative at Nuclear Threat Initiative) Margaret A. Hamburg (Vice President for Biological Programs at Nuclear Threat Initiative) and Joshua Lederberg (Directs the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Informatics at The Rockefeller University) 2003 MICROBIAL THREATS TO HEALTH: EMERGENCE, DETECTION, AND RESPONSE
Microbial threats to health are microbes1 that lead to disease in humans. The challenges posed by microbial threats to health are daunting. Most developing nations have not shared fully in the public health and technological advances that have aided in the fight against infectious disease in the United States—a fight that some had hoped would come close to eliminating these threats in this country (see Box 2-1). In developing countries, clean water is scarce; sewage systems are overwhelmed or nonexistent; the urban metropolis is growing exponentially as the global market economy expands and rural agricultural workers migrate to cities; and economic need, political conflict, and wars are displacing millions of people and creating growing refugee populations (see Chapter 3). Thus, infectious diseases affect poorer nations in the developing world disproportionately, and from thence become a global burden. Infectious diseases are responsible for one in every two deaths in developing countries—and are the leading cause of death for children and young adults (WHO, 1999a, 2000a). It has been estimated that every hour, 1,500 people die from an infectious disease—over half of them are children under 5 years of age. Ninety percent of deaths from infectious diseases worldwide are due to respiratory infec- tions, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and measles (see Table 2-1).
Even conservative estimates place us on brink of a global pandemic that will kill over 100 million people. No other threat compares in likelihood and lethality
Richard Falkenrath (Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution) March 16, 2006 “Public Health Medical Preparedness” CQ Congressional Testimony, lexis
A catastrophic disease event is admittedly an extreme scenario, residing at the very highest end of the threat spectrum. With respect to manmade threats - bioterrorism - I am not suggesting that such a scenario can be easily effectuated or is imminent. Nonetheless, I do not believe that the trends are in our favor. With every passing year, the latent technological potential of states and non-state actors to use disease effectively as a weapon rises inexorably. With respect to naturally occurring disease threats, no one can estimate precisely the likelihood, timing, or consequence of the appearance of a new human pathogen.5 However, for at least one potentially catastrophic disease, even the conservative World Health Organization concludes that "the world may be on the brink of another pandemic."6 According to the WHO, a pandemic along the lines of the relatively mild pandemic of 1957 would result in 2 million to 7.4 million deaths worldwide. A pandemic with the death rate of the 1918 Spanish flu - perhaps the most extreme human disease event in history - could result in several million fatalities in the United States and perhaps over one hundred million abroad. In sum, when viewed in comparison to all other conceivable threats to U.S. national security, the catastrophic disease threat is and for the foreseeable future will remain the gravest danger we face. No state, no terrorist group, no ideology or system of government, no other tactic or target or category of weapons, no technological accident, and no other natural phenomenon, presents as terrifying a combination of likelihood, poor defenses and countermeasures, and consequence.
AIDS Collapse Global Economy
AIDS leads to the collapse of the global economy
Joseph Riverson, Medical Advisor for AID’s For World Vision, December 1st, 2002 (“AID’s A Century From Now” Accessed 7/23/07, , Google, GC)
The next 10 decades will be painful. We could easily see a billion deaths from AIDS. Each will represent a family torn apart. Together, AIDS will devastate villages, cities, national economies and the very fabric of society, especially in the developing world. And the United States will feel the effects -- economically, politically and socially. The AIDS epidemic already has devastated my continent, Africa. Of the 42 million people worldwide with AIDS, more than 29 million live there. But the pandemic's center of gravity is shifting to Europe and Asia, where sheer population size -- let alone military and economic power -- threaten global security. This will not be the first time the world has been torn apart by disease. In the mid-14th century, the Black Death is believed to have killed 25 to 50 percent of Europe's population, and an equally high toll from Asia and North Africa. It created labor scarcities that, some historians argue, accelerated economic and social change, leading eventually to capitalism. A century from now, will my great-grandchildren live in a world that has seen greater social progress, albeit at an awful price? Or will we have paid that price for nothing but what historians will call the "Black Death" of the 21st century? It is difficult to predict the exact course AIDS will take over the next century -- and, more significantly, how the world will respond. My medical training is of some help. But AIDS is far more than a medical problem. It has profound economic, political and social ramifications and requires a multi-faceted response. Africa's AIDS epidemic has been easy to overlook. Africa lacks military power and economic influence; by many measures, the entire continent contributes less to the world economy than Switzerland alone. The West, however, will not be able to ignore the emerging AIDS crisis in Eastern Europe and Asia (Eurasia). Their combined economy is greater than that of the United States or Western Europe. Four of the world's five largest armed forces are in the region, as are four of seven declared nuclear states. Conservative estimates put the number of people with AIDS in China, India and Russia at 7 million. Even with a "mild" epidemic, the number of AIDS cases in China, Russia and India alone would reach 66 million by 2025. Under a worst-case scenario, these three countries together would have more than 250 million cases by 2025."Eurasia's HIV/AIDS epidemic will clearly have far-reaching economic ramifications in the coming decades," contends Nicholas Eberstadt, writing on "The Future of AIDS" in the November/December edition of "Foreign Affairs." Economic output could stagnate or decline in all three countries, depending on the severity of the epidemic. Russia, in particular, could be marginalized. Once one of the two most powerful nations on earth, Russia already has experienced more than a decade of turbulent political and economic transition. Coupled with demographic and military decline and questionable control over its nuclear arsenal, Russia represents a dangerous incubator for a disease for which there is still neither cure nor vaccine. India, with a population greater than the entire continent of Africa, "can either be the home of the world's largest and most devastating AIDS epidemic -- or, with the support of the rest of the world, it can become the best example of how this virus can be defeated," said philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Gates, who better than most corporate executives recognizes the potential economic impact of the pandemic, last month traveled to India to make a $100 million contribution to local AIDS efforts. He cited the country's "vast human resources and burgeoning pharmaceutical industry" as strategic advantages in fighting AIDS. However, life-extending drug therapies will be out of reach for most AIDS patients in India, and virtually all in Africa. At $600 per patient per year, they cost more than most people with AIDS earn -- annually. Prevention is much less expensive than cure, a lesson most African countries have learned too late. But Eurasia still has time to learn from Africa's experience. AIDS has wiped out, even reversed, hard-won development gains in Africa. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have seen decline, often drastic, in both income and life expectancy. By 2010, for example, a child born in Botswana can expect to live 27 years. AIDS seems fickle, devastating one country while leaving others relatively unscathed.
AIDS undermines the global economy
Susan Hunter (independent consultant to certain agencies of the United Nations ) 2003BLACK DEATH: AIDS IN AFRICA, p. 322
Third, HIV/AIDS has already created a decided global economic drag, a downward spiral of lost productivity, increasing numbers of sick and vulnerable, and soaring costs of healthcare that threaten our markets, our producers, and our pocketbooks. The drag will become much, much worse by the end of this decade in Africa and will become especially critical when Asian countries begin to experience more widespread illness and death. Africa will lose an estimated 20 percent of its population productivity by 2010, and Asia is likely to experience the same magnitude of loss between 2010 and 2020. Globalization means that the prosperity of developed countries depends on cheap production and growing markets in developing countries; widespread illness and death means they will disappear. And then there is the cost of care if the developed world decides to help, a precaution that says be self-defensive in a world of interconnected microbes.
AIDS Hurts Economic Growth
AIDS will devastate the economies of African countries and make growth impossible
Avert: Averting HIV and AIDS / June 26, 2007 Title: The Impact of HIV and AIDS on Africa
Through its impacts on the labour force, households and enterprises, AIDS has played a more significant role in the reversal of human development than any other single factor. 39 One aspect of this development-reversal has been the damage that the epidemic has done to the economy, which, in turn, has made it more difficult for countries to respond to the crisis. One way in which HIV and AIDS affect the economy is by reducing the labour supply through increased mortality and illness. Amongst those who are able to work, productivity is likely to decline as a result of HIV-related illness. Government income also declines, as tax revenues fall and governments are pressured to increase their spending to deal with the rising HIV prevalence. The abilities of African countries to diversify their industrial base, expand exports and attract foreign investment are integral to economic progress in the region. By making labour more expensive and reducing profits, AIDS limits the ability of African countries to attract industries that depend on low-cost labour and makes investments in African businesses less desirable. HIV and AIDS therefore threaten the foundations of economic development in Africa.
AIDS destroys economies by gutting labor productivity and preventing new economic investment
Dr. Rene Loewenson (Director, Training and Research Support Centre in Zimbabwe) and Professor Alan Whiteside (Director of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at University of Natal South Africa) 2001 “HIV/AIDS Implications for Poverty Reduction”, UNITED NATIONS DEVELPMENT PROGRAMME POLICY PAPER, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
HIV/AIDS leads to falling labour quality and supply, more frequent and longer periods of absenteeism, losses in skills and experience, resulting in shifts towards a younger, less experienced workforce and subsequent production losses. These impacts intensify existing skills shortages and increase costs of training and benefits. They are felt throughout the economy, from the macro-level to the household. HIV/AIDS is already putting a brake on economic growth in the worst affected countries through diversion of investment, deficit-creating pressures on public resources, and loss of adult labour and productivity. It is estimated that in the 1990s AIDS reduced Africa’s per capita annual growth by 0.8 percent. Models suggest that in the worst affected countries 1–2 percentage points will be shaved off per capita growth in the coming years. This means that after two decades, many economies will be about 20–40 percent smaller than they would have been in the absence of AIDS. The private sector too will be affected by HIV/AIDS. The cost per worker per year of the disease has been estimated at between US$20 and US$200. These costs are mainly due to lost work time and benefits. A recent study in South Africa shows the cost of AIDS for one company will be 7.2% of total salary. Large private concerns may base investment decisions on their perception of AIDS and its consequences. The potential impact of AIDS on customer purchasing power in Southern Africa led one retail firm, for example, to diversify geographically and open stores in Poland and the Czech Republic. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the consequences may be even more significant for small enterprises. They do not have the human or financial resources to weather the impact and may, as a result, collapse. Unfortunately, however, the impact of AIDS on the private sector remains poorly mapped and recognized.
HIV/AIDs Leads to failure of families to provide, reducing labor force and agricultural products, exacerbating world poverty
Julia Cabassi, December, 2004 (The NGO HIV/AIDs Code of Practice Project, “Renewing Our Voice”, July 23, 2007, CB)
HIV/AIDS has devastating and far-reaching implications for individuals, families, communities and societies. Epidemic diseases are not new, but what sets HIV/AIDS apart is its unprecedented negative impact on the social and economic development of nations most affected by it. In high prevalence countries, skilled personnel in public, social, education and health care services are becoming ill and dying, undermining the capacity of services to meet demands that continue to escalate as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. The pandemic is reducing labor forces and agricultural productivity, thus exacerbating global poverty and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS infection. Millions of children in developing countries are without adequate care and support, which places additional pressures on families and communities to care for orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS (OVC). As parents and care-givers become ill or die, children are increasingly shouldering the burden of generating an income, producing food and taking care of family members who are ill.
AIDS Hurts Economic Growth
HIV/AIDS Harms Economic Growth
Erica Barks-Rugles “The Economic Impact of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa,” 2001Brookings Institute, September 7/23/07, MS
Malcolm McPherson of the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government addressed how the spread of HIV/AIDS seriously erodes human capacity and adversely affects "capacity deepening," which is broadly defined as building upon existing skills in order to increase productivity. Skilled personnel are lost and valuable labor time is consumed when workers become debilitated, and work schedules are disrupted when organizations replace workers and managers who are ill or have died. The loss of capacity reduces economic growth. Several aggregate models project significant reductions in economic growth rates for African economies. These modeling exercises typically follow a pattern of reporting "with" and "without AIDS" scenarios. An example is the widely cited ING Barings model produced for the July 2000 HIV/AIDS conference in Durban, which showed that long-term economic growth in South Africa would decline 0.4 percent per year due to HIV/AIDS. Recent research, however, suggests that these studies may be too optimistic. What they fail to consider is that by undermining human capacity, HIV/AIDS reduces productivity, disrupts organizations, and unravels institutions. The implication is that the epidemic's effects are more likely to be non-linear. Both theory and practice indicate this is the case. At the aggregate level, the impact of HIV/AIDS has elements consistent with endogenous growth theory. The spread of HIV/AIDS reduces labor productivity, raises private and public consumption, and thereby reduces income and savings. With lower savings, the rate of investment falls, reinforcing the decline in economic growth. The loss of labor productivity occurs because a larger share of the work force becomes debilitated and dies causing organizations to lose workers with critical skills. The phenomenon can be likened to "running Adam Smith in reverse." Adam Smith argued that the "expansion of the market"—typically identified as economic growth—creates opportunities for specialization and the division of labor. The spread of HIV/AIDS reverses that process as organizations experience disruption, and declining income undercuts the earlier gains achieved through specialization and the division of labor.
AIDS causes a decline in productivity and is a blow to the economy
Carol Coombe (Independent Education Advisor) 2000 Current Issues in Comparative Education Volume 3, Number 1 / December 1 “Keeping the education system healthy: Managing the impact of HIV/AIDS on education in South Africa” Accessed online: Google Scholar
HIV/AIDS will cause productivity to decline in all sectors because of illness on the job, absenteeism due to personal or family illness, and funeral attendance. Public sector services will cost more, and economic growth will slow as the number of skilled workers declines and cannot be replaced. Child mortality will increase as poverty deepens. Survivors who are orphaned, unsupervised and inadequately parented are more likely to engage in criminal activities. Ultimately, South Africa is likely to experience a real reversal of development gains. Further development will be more difficult, and development goals, including those set by Government for the education sector, will be unattainable for the foreseeable future.
AIDS Hurts Economic Growth
HIV/AIDS Poses a Threat to Development and Economic Growth
Erica Barks-Rugles “The Economic Impact of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa,” 2001Brookings Institute, September 7/23/07, MS
Since the first cases of HIV/AIDS were reported twenty years ago, nearly 58 million people have been infected and 22 million have died. Consensus in the international community has grown over the past two years that HIV/AIDS poses a threat to development, security, and economic growth. A few studies over the last ten years have looked at the impact on workers and their employers. With momentum building to prevent new infections and treat those already afflicted, more information is needed to assess economic impacts and cost efficacy of treatments. On June 28, 2001, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored a conference on measuring the costs of HIV/AIDS and organizing responses to it. The conference brought together researchers, business people, and policymakers to discuss economic impacts, prevention costs, education, and treatment. This report is a summary of the findings presented at the conference.
Area’s With High Levels Of Aid’s Experience Economic Downfalls
Lori Bollinger and John Stover, Center For Development And Population September 1999 (“The Economic Impact Of Aids In South Africa”, Accessed 7/22/07, , GC)
AIDS has the potential to create severe economic impacts in many African countries. It is different from most other diseases because it strikes people in the most productive age groups and is essentially 100 percent fatal. The effects will vary according to the severity of the AIDS epidemic and the structure of the national economies. The two major economic effects are a reduction in the labor supply and increased costs:
Labor Supply
• The loss of young adults in their most productive years will affect overall economic output
• If AIDS is more prevalent among the economic elite, then the impact may be much larger than the absolute number of AIDS deaths indicates costs
• The direct costs of AIDS include expenditures for medical care, drugs, and funeral expenses
• Indirect costs include lost time due to illness, recruitment and training costs to replace workers, and care of orphans
• If costs are financed out of savings, then the reduction in investment could lead to a significant reduction in economic growth
In contrast to most of Africa, South Africa has a very small agricultural sector, employing a negligible number of people in the formal sector. It is important to note, however, that in the formal sector, as much as 52% of the people aged 16-30 are unemployed, with half of those classified as marginalized, that is, with little chance of obtaining formal sector employment due to a lack of education. South Africa has a highly developed mining and manufacturing sector, but much of the labor force in the mining industry is foreign.
South Africa is the largest producer of gold in the world, producing about 30% of total world production. The manufactured products are diverse, and include chemicals, petroleum and coal products, food products, and transport equipment. The per capita
GNP figure for the country of US$3,400 masks the disparities that exist within the country; 13 percent of the population is very well off, while 53 percent are very poor.
Only 50 percent of this very poor group has a primary school education, over 33 percent of these children suffer from malnutrition, and only about 25 percent have electricity and running water.1 The lowest 20 percent of the households spend only 3 percent of the total expenditure, while the highest 20 percent spends 61 percent of the total.2
The economic effects of AIDS will be felt first by individuals and their families, then ripple outwards to firms and businesses and the macro-economy. This paper will consider each of these levels in turn and provide examples from South Africa to illustrate these.
AIDS Hurts Economic Growth
AIDS have been responsible for the loss of economic power
Business Report, October 22nd, 2001 (“AID’s Hit’s Skilled Economy”, Accessed 7/23/07, , GC)
Pretoria - South Africa would have 4 million to 8 million fewer people in 2010 because of Aids and had already lost more than 4 million highly skilled people and entrepreneurs, Carel van Aardt, a research director at Unisa's Bureau for Market Research (BMR), said on Friday. "Our estimate is of 4,3 million less highly skilled people and entrepreneurs, due to Aids related deaths by 2010," he told the BMR's annual research review meeting. "But this figure would immediately double if people who cited HIV/Aids as a reason for leaving the country were included. "A lot of people want to leave the country because they are scared of the future impact of Aids." He said HIV/Aids would also have contributed to a strong growth in unemployment and poverty by 2010, as well as a decline in business confidence and fixed domestic investment, hurting economic growth and development. Van Aardt stressed the population losses due to HIV/Aids would be in the key productive ages of the population and there would be 7 million Aids orphans. HIV/Aids would also effect expenditure and saving patterns. He said HIV/Aids would also affect entrepreneurship and formal sector behavior, with the formal sector more wary about putting money into projects and into job creation.
AIDS Cause Economic Decline
AIDS leads economic decline
Colin Mcinnes (specialises in strategic studies and in health and international relations) “HIV/AIDS and security” International Affairs 82, 2 (2006) 315-326 © The Royal Institute of International Affairs 2006.
The effects of the disease on economies and on governance have been consistently highlighted by the UN and other commentators as potentially destabilizing. Moreover, the significance of such instability might be felt beyond the confines of a failing state: the previous decade had been marked by examples of failing states creating problems for international security, while in the wake of 9/11 a link was drawn between failing states and international terrorism, notably by the Bush administration in the United States.5 The potential economic impact of HIV/AIDS includes lost productivity due to worker illness, absenteeism and low morale; the loss of skilled workers, with their replacements perhaps less well educated and poorly trained and motivated; reduced business investment as revenues shrink or are diverted into AIDS-related health-care schemes; reduced external investment as health costs increase and productivity falls; the flight of capital out of AIDS- afflicted countries into more productive regions; and reduced savings as money is spent on health care. HIV/AIDS poses particularly severe economic problems because of the cumulative effects of the disease over a number of years; because its full effects are postponed as those infected become ill only gradually but then place an increasing economic burden on society; and because of its disproportionate impact upon workers in what should be the most productive period of their lives. In particular, some of the key industries for African states—including mining, transport and agriculture—appear to be particularly susceptible to the effects of HIV/AIDS.6 Estimates of the impact commonly range from significant reductions in economic growth over time to reductions in GDP. One USAID study suggests that in certain African states where HIV prevalence rates were 20 per cent or higher, GDP declined by 2.6 per cent.7 Such economic decline may increase income inequalities and poverty, exacerbating or creating social and political unrest. A variety of social and political problems arising from high HIV prevalence are also commonly identified as potentially destabilizing. The unusually high prevalence of HIV among skilled professionals, including civil servants, teachers, police and heath workers, may threaten the institutions that make a state run effectively. This may undermine confidence not just in a government but in the state itself.8 As teachers become ill and as children stay away from school to work or care for HIV-positive parents, quality of education suffers; as health workers contract HIV or leave countries because of high prevalence rates, already pressurized health systems may fail; police and other security forces necessary for public order appear particularly susceptible to HIV, and their number and effectiveness may decline.9 All of these threaten what the International Crisis Group termed ‘the very fibre of what constitutes a nation’.10 Democratic development may also be harmed if societies become polarized as a consequence of HIV/AIDS, if disaffection with the political process sets in, or as a consequence of aid dependency.11 The stigma of AIDS may also lead to exclusion from work and/or society, creating alienation, fatalism and anger among those who are HIV-positive, who may then become prone to criminal violence or to following violent leaders.12
AIDS Hurts Development
AIDS undercuts all African development
Mark Schneider and Michael Moodie (CSIS Analysts) 2002 THE DESTABILIZING IMPACTS OF HIV/AIDS,
The disease attacks economic security today and economic opportunity for the future. It increases the cost of doing business, jeopardizes key industries, and decreases foreign and domestic investment. In sub-Saharan Africa, when one family member becomes infected with HIV/AIDS, the family’s income tends to fall between 40 and 60 percent. Investigators have developed a range of methods to measure and predict the effects of HIV/AIDS on economic growth. The most conservative models, those prepared by the World Bank, suggest that when national infection levels surpass 5 percent, economic growth slows measurably; when they reach 10 percent, growth stops. And when infection rates surpass 20 percent, as they have in seven African states, the World Health Organization estimates that 1 percent or more of GDP is lost per year, in societies that already are among the poorest in the world. UNAIDS expects that heavily affected countries could lose one-fifth of their GDP by 2020. Others have suggested that the rate of decline may be exponential, and that the final toll may be much worse.
AIDS prevents African development
PUBLIC AGENDA, October 30, 2006
Speaking on " The HIV/AIDS and Women: The Reality", the Director- General of the Ghana AIDS Commission, Prof Sakyi Awuku Amoa, observed that "HIV/AIDS is an epidemic and a development crisis that has the capacity to wipe off a large segment of the most productive human capital of the society". HIV/ AIDS has no doubt become the modern day slave trade of Africa ,considering its depopulation of the continent on the scale of the slave trade. With under-population, the continent was bereft of the required labour force for economic development. This phenomenon, more than any other was largely responsible for the present levels of deprivation and poverty on the continent.
AIDS makes African development impossible
Tony Barnett (Economic and Social Research Council Professorial Research Fellow) and Alan Whiteside (Health and Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at University of KwaZulu-Natal) 2006 AIDS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: DISEASE AND GLOBALIZATION, p. 24
The impact of HIV/AIDS on child mortality is highest in those countries that had significantly reduced child mortality due to other causes. Many HIV-infected children survive beyond their first birthdays only to die before the age of five. In Zimbabwe, 70% of all deaths among children younger than five are due to AIDS. In the Bahamas, 60% of deaths among children younger than five are due to AIDS. As a result of AIDS, only 5 out of 51 countries in sub-Saharan Africa will reach the International Conference on Population and Development goals for decreased child mortality. This means that for many countries, particularly in Africa, 'development' becomes virtually impossible in the era of AIDS individual diseases. Well-being, of which health is a part, is a reflection of general social and economic conditions.
AIDS Causes Poverty
AIDS epidemic will cause global economic crisis for several reasons; including loss of a trained workforce, lack of education and decreased national incomes. This will cause extreme poverty, disease spread, failed states, and millions of deaths. 14000 more people are at risk every day.
Pressureworks “Poverty and HIV/AIDS” 2006, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
According a report by the UK government's Department for International Development, unless urgent action is taken, the HIV epidemic will 'turn the clock back decades in the fight against poverty'. HIV is poised to have more economic impact than any previous epidemic. Most illnesses strike hardest among the vulnerable - the very young and the very old. HIV is different. It is killing millions of adults in their prime, leaving children without parents and families without breadwinners. It leaves hospitals short of nurses, and schools bereft of teachers. Companies lose trained workforces and the heart is torn out of fragile economies. The HIV epidemic increases poverty and reduces growth This creates a vicious cycle: more poverty and less national income means further HIV spread is more likely, because poverty makes people vulnerable to HIV. Poverty increases risk of infection Vast gaps between rich and poor mean that the poor are denied medicines and treatment purely because they cannot pay for them. And they are denied even the most basic necessities that might enable them to avoid the disease in the first place. So it's impossible to overestimate the importance of education and literacy in the fight against HIV.Children are in the front line of the epidemic But poverty also means no money for education. When a family is poor or starving, then everyone who can has to work for money or food. This takes priority over schooling. Children are right in the front line of the epidemic. The effects HIV has on them are merciless. Not only sick children are afflicted; every single day more than 6,000 children are orphaned by AIDS. More than a third of these are under 5 years old. Families are being destroyed It is generally believed that in the worst affected countries, particularly in Africa, the extended families of afflicted children will act as a social safety net, taking in orphans and caring for them. In theory this protects economically fragile societies from the full force of the problem. It is true that extended families are caring for 90 per cent of HIV orphans. However, it is precisely those countries where the extended family is already most stretched that will see the largest increases in orphans in the future .Economies are disintegrating Stretched it certainly is. In some countries in southern Africa, HIV prevalence is higher than was thought possible, exceeding 30 per cent. In these overburdened countries the numbers of families headed by women and grandparents - even orphaned children themselves - is increasing dramatically. These households tend to be poorer. Breadwinners lose working time and income because they must care for their families. And, as the situation worsens, the breadwinners are less and less able to provide for the children in their care. The economic structure of these countries is disintegrating and it is hard to be positive about what is left. The eldest of today's orphans will be entering their 20s in 2010. There will be little left for them.HIV is different tHIV is differentfr om other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Often it will show no sign of its presence until a decade or more after infection. As a result many millions of HIV-positive people believe themselves to be healthy, when they might have been infected for up to ten years. All that time they could have been unknowingly passing the virus on to others. This makes it difficult for a country to measure the spread of HIV, unless it has a comprehensive voluntary testing programme - and these cost money.HIV carries a stigma Then there is the stigma of HIV. Individuals are often reluctant to go for testing, fearing the shame and social exclusion that being revealed as HIV-positive could bring - something those of us in richer countries can understand. The kind of terrible impact that can overcome such stigma is only felt a decade after the damage is done. With STIs - and sexuality in general - such an uncomfortable topic of discussion, governments are often unwilling to address the spread of HIV until the problem is already escalating out of control.HIV just isn't getting the political priority it needs. Forty million people are infected Forty million people are currently living with and dying of HIV. 14,000 more are infected each day. It is a global problem, not just in that it affects people all around the world - which it does - but because the effects of such large numbers stretch far beyond the worst-afflicted countries. Given that HIV strikes hardest precisely those who are most productive - working, bringing up children, growing food, tending to the sick - it is easy to see how incredibly difficult it is for a country to develop in the grip of HIV. HIV is a global crisis and we must do something about it The UK and other rich countries have a responsibility to face up to this problem. At home we must acknowledge that we are at risk from HIV, and that a life spent with this condition, whether or not drugs are available, is a great burden to bear. But outside our borders we must address HIV as the global crisis it is. Trade rules and aid levels must be looked at accordingly, so that assistance can be given where it is most needed. HIV is so great an obstacle to development that increased aid is not an option - it is an absolute necessity.
AIDS Causes Poverty
HIV/AIDS causes poverty
Alan Whiteside (Professor of Economics and director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at UKZN) 2002 “Poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa', Third World Quarterly, 23:2, 313 – 332 7/23/07 MS
HIV/AIDS leads to many kinds of poverty. Until recently the main emphasis was on financial and income impoverishment. Households and nations were assumed to become poorer as a result of the illness and death of members and citizens. The pathways of impact are illustrated by Figure 6. The first and greatest impact is at the level of individuals and households. Macroeconomic impacts take longer to evolve and the scale and magnitude of macro-impacts will depend on the scale and location of micro-level impacts. Household-level and community-level impacts are most serious but there are few data about this. From the limited household studies, it can be concluded that the effect of illness and death on poverty in households depends on the number of cases the household experiences; the characteristics of deceased individuals; the household’s composition and asset array; community attitudes towards helping needy households and the general availability of resources—the level of life—in that community; and the broader resources available for assistance to households. In simple terms the poorer the households and communities, the worse the impact.
Unchecked HIV/AIDS related poverty will worsen in years to come
Alan Whiteside (Professor of Economics and director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at UKZN) 2002 “Poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa', Third World Quarterly, 23:2, 313 – 332 7/23/07 MS
The HIV/AIDS epidemic is the most devastating epidemic in recent history. The influenza epidemic of 1918–19 is estimated to have killed 100 million people (Kolata, 2000); by 2000 nearly 58 million people had been infected by HIV and 22 million had already died. And the epidemic continues to spread. HIV/AIDS is along-wave event compared with other epidemics. The true death toll cannot be estimated until the full wave form of the epidemic has been seen. It may be as long as 20 years before we can say that the world epidemic has peaked and/or begun to decline. If we take into account the social and economic impacts of the epidemic, in particular HIV/AIDS-related poverty, it is clear that this will get very much worse over the coming years and decades unless there is a concerted effort to address it.
Aids Root Cause Of Poverty
HIV/Aids reduces development and destroys economies- This creates poverty, which in turn increases the transmission rates of HIV/Aids
Dr. Rene Loewenson (Director, Training and Research Support Centre in Zimbabwe) and Professor Alan Whiteside (Director of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at University of Natal South Africa) 2001 “HIV/AIDS Implications for Poverty Reduction”, UNITED NATIONS DEVELPMENT PROGRAMME POLICY PAPER, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
HIV/AIDS is having a disastrous impact on the social and economic development of countries most affected by the epidemic. In much of Africa and other affected regions, this epidemic will prove to be the biggest single obstacle to reaching national poverty reduction targets and the development goals agreed on at the United Nations Millennium Summit. The challenge is immense: How do countries reduce the proportion of people living in poverty when up to a quarter of households are decimated by AIDS? How do countries deliver on policies aimed at equity in access to economic opportunities and social services when AIDS widens economic differentials and undermines service delivery? How do countries deliver on promises to improve quality of life for coming generations when 40 million children will grow up orphaned by AIDS? How does a country like South Africa deliver on its goal of being a regional engine of growth with over 4 million HIV-positive people and the fastest growing infection rate in the world? The devastation caused by HIV/AIDS is unique because it is depriving families, communities and entire nations of their young and most productive people. The epidemic is deepening poverty, reversing human development achievements, worsening gender inequalities, eroding the ability of governments to maintain essential services, reducing labour productivity and supply, and putting a brake on economic growth. These worsening conditions in turn make people and households even more at risk of, or vulnerable to, the epidemic, and sabotages global and national efforts to improve access to treatment and care. This cycle must be broken to ensure a sustainable solution to the HIV/AIDS crisis. The response to HIV/AIDS so far has focused, rightly so, on the challenge of containing the epidemic and preventing new infections through advocacy, information and education campaigns, behaviour change communication, condom distribution, programmes targeting groups that are particularly vulnerable to infection, and other key interventions. The other part of the response is focusing on treatment and care for people living with HIV and AIDS — efforts that are expected to intensify as new treatments become more accessible and affordable. Both prevention and treatment are top priorities in not only saving lives and reducing human suffering, but also in limiting the future impact on human development and poverty reduction efforts.
HIV/Aids will induce poverty
David Loyn (BBC Developing World Correspondent) 2003 “The vicious circle of Aids and poverty”, BBC News, November 19, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
The UN development body, UNCTAD, predicts that 16 million agricultural workers will die in Africa in the next 20 years. And in societies where teachers and doctors are dying as well as the farmers, HIV/Aids will make another generation poor unless it is checked. In the worst-affected regions of rural southern Africa, a third of pregnant women are HIV positive. This is a health challenge which would be hard to cope with even in the well-financed countries of the global North, but it is a clear death sentence here. And there are disturbing signs that sexual abuse of children is increasing as societies fall apart.
Poverty Hurts Public Health
Poverty Is Devastating To Public Health
Ruth Barrington (Chief Executive of the Health Research Board. She is a graduate of University College Dublin, the College of Europe, Bruges and the London School of Economics) April 2004 “Poverty is bad for your health” 7/23/07, MS
An association that people have understood for centuries has been underpinned by recent research into the association between health and wealth. That research has consistently shown a strong association between poor health and low income on the one hand and higher income and better health on the other. This is most obviously the case for developing countries where the income of so many people is too low to guarantee access to even the basic necessities for a healthy life, such as clean water or adequate food. What was surprising was that a strong link between income and health is also found in developed countries, some of which have mature welfare states and health services that are accessible to all on the basis of need.
Poverty Causes Conflict
Unchecked Poverty leads to civil war and conflict
James Speth (Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; former Administrator, United Nations Development Programm) March 21 1996 “In Africa, Unattended Poverty leads to Conflict” International Herald Tribune, 7/23/07, MS
Africa accounts for 33 of the world's 50 poorest countries. In Sierra Leone, where tens of thousands of people displaced by civil war struggle to keep hope alive in "temporary" camps, the average life lasts 42 years and per capita GNP is $200 a year. Average school attendance is barely one year. In Niger, life expectancy is 45 years, there is virtually no schooling at all, and per capita GNP is $310 Still reeling from its bloody civil war, Liberia is in a downward spiral. If deprivation leads to war, disease, migration, refugees and need for emergency lifesaving and multinational peacekeeping, why not move to prevent conflict and its fellow plagues through development assistance? There is no good answer other than to support preventive development today so as to avoid the costs of drastic cures in the Rwandas and Liberias of tomorrow.
AIDS Guts Education
The AIDS epidemic has had a devastating effect on teachers and education
Avert: Averting HIV and AIDS / June 26, 2007 Title: The Impact of HIV and AIDS on Africa
HIV/AIDS does not only affect pupils but teachers as well. In the early stages of the African epidemic it was reported that teachers were at a higher risk of becoming infected with HIV than the general population, because of their relatively high socio-economic status and a lack of understanding about how the virus is transmitted. This trend appears to have changed, as evidence increasingly shows that the more educated an individual is, the more likely they are to change their behaviour. 25 But HIV and AIDS are still having a devastating affect on the already inadequate supply of teachers in African countries; for example, a study in South Africa found that 21% of teachers aged 25-34 are living with HIV. 26 Teachers who are affected by HIV and AIDS are likely to take increasing periods of time off work. Those with sick families may also take time off to attend funerals or to care for sick or dying relatives, and further absenteeism may result from the psychological affects of the epidemic. 27 When a teacher falls ill, the class may be taken on by another teacher, may be combined with another class, or may be left untaught. Even when there is a sufficient supply of teachers to replace losses, there can be a significant impact on the students. This is particularly concerning given the important role that teachers can play in the fight against AIDS. One example is the benefits that a good teacher can give to children who have lost their parents to AIDS: "It is important to recognise teachers as key partners in the care of orphans and vulnerable children. A teacher’s attitude can do much towards acceptance, or rejection and stigmatisation, of an orphan in a classroom. Teachers need to be trained in recognising the behavioural problems associated with unsolved grief.” -Dr Sue Perry, Zimbabwe- 28 The illness or death of teachers is especially devastating in rural areas where schools depend heavily on one or two teachers. Moreover, skilled teachers are not easily replaced. Tanzania has estimated that it needs around 45,000 additional teachers to make up for those who have died or left work because of HIV and AIDS. The greatest proportion of staff that have been lost, according to the Tanzania Teacher’s Union, were experienced staff between the ages of 41 and 50. 29
AIDS Cause Nuclear War
If left unchecked AIDS will unravel the economies of Africa, causing instability. AIDS will spread out of Africa, causing instability around the globe, and triggering nuclear civil wars
Second Annual Report to Congress PEPFAR “ACTION TODAY, A FOUNDATION FOR TOMORROW: The President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief” 2006
As Atwood notes, HIV is much more than a social or developmental threat — it is a concrete threat to stability and security. Nelson Mandela, in a speech before the World Economic Forum in 1997, hinted of the potential for conflict and instability to emerge when a people realize that their government is unable to meet their needs when he noted that, “South Africans are beginning to understand the cost [of HIV/AIDS] … observing with growing dismay its impact on the efforts of our new democracy to achieve the goals of reconstruction and development.” In addition to eroding the link between people and their government, infectious epidemics have a more pernicious ability to pit people against each other within societies. As the resource base begins to shrink, competition among surviving groups for access to and control over the levers of power and influence increases. This competition often results in social and political fragmentation and ethnic, racial or socio-economic conflict. David Gordon of the United States National Intelligence Council, one of the first policy analysts to recognize the connection between health and security, noted in his ground-breaking 2000 “National Intelligence Estimate” the potential for intra-state conflict resulting from epidemic disease. Gordon noted that, “[t]he severe social and economic impact of infectious diseases … and the infiltration of these diseases into ruling political and military elites and middle classes of developing countries are likely to intensify the struggle for political power to control scarce state resources.” The global nature of the threat HIV/AIDS represents becomes immediately clear when we pause to remember how interconnected and mobile we all are. Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, warned members of the Security Council in 2000 that, “if it [HIV/AIDS] is not dealt with, it will clearly wreck the economies of Africa and the subcontinent. [AIDS] will spread; you can’t draw a wall around Africa and commit continental triage.” Indeed, HIV is spreading daily — hourly — reaching epidemic levels of infection throughout the developing world. While currently concentrated primarily in sub- Saharan Africa, the disease is already emerging as a security threat in other countries, including some thought of as economically well-developed. Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, has commented: “We have every reason to assume that the epidemic in Southeast Asia will soon be just as widespread as it is in Africa, and that East Africa’s experience — a slowdown of its economy — will be replicated in Eastern Europe and the developing countries of Asia and Latin America.” UNAIDS, the main advocate for global action on the epidemic, is tasked with preventing transmission of HIV, providing care and support, reducing the vulnerability of individuals and communities to HIV/AIDS, and alleviating the impact of the epidemic. A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified five nations as the “Next Wave,” ripe for an explosion of HIV infection rates rivaling those of sub-Saharan Africa: Nigeria and Ethiopia (together representing over a quarter of that already ravaged continent’s population), Russia, China and India. The last three nations, which collectively contain close to a third of the Earth’s population, are all nuclear-armed countries beset with ethnic and social strife and burdened by economic and political pressures that threaten to erupt into internal conflict. The addition of HIV/AIDS, with its demonstrated ability to disrupt society at all levels, will only increase the potential for regional conflict and instability.
AIDS Causes War
presence of AIDS multiplies the impact of war
P. W. Singer is a Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brooking Institution. Survival, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 145–158 ©The International Institute for Strategic Studies. accessed 7-24-7
Speaking at the UN Security Council session, James Wolfensohn, the head of the World Bank, stated, “Many of us used to think of AIDS as a health issue. We were wrong…nothing we have seen is a greater challenge to the peace and stability of African societies than the epidemic of aids…we face a major development crisis, and more than that, a security crisis.” Peter Piot, chairman of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), similarly noted that “Conflicts and AIDS are linked like evil twins.” In fact, this connection made between the epidemic of AIDS and the danger of increased instability and war was also one of the few continuities between the way the Clinton and Bush administration foreign policy teams saw the world. Basing its assessment on a CIA report that but also multiplies its impact. it discussed an increased prospects of “revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, genocide, and disruptive regime transitions” because of the disease, the Clinton Administration declared it a “national security threat” in 2000. While it was originally accused of pandering to certain activist groups, by the time of Secretary Powell’s confirmation hearings the next year, the lead foreign policy voice of the new administration had also declared it a “national security problem.” He later affirmed that it presented “a clear and present danger to the world.” Similarly, US Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky stated that “HIV/AIDS is a threat to security and global stability, plain and simple” The looming security implications of AIDS, particularly within Africa, are thus now a baseline assumption of the disease’s danger. However, this threat has barely been fleshed out and the mechanisms by which experts claim that “AIDS has changed the landscape of war” are barely understood. This article seeks to fill this space. AIDS not only threatens to heighten the risks of war, but also multiply its impact. The disease will hollow out military capabilities, AIDS not only threatens to heighten the risks of war, as well as state capacities in general, weakening both to the point of failure and collapse. Moreover, at these times of increased vulnerability, the disease also creates new pools of militant recruits, who portend even greater violence, as well jeopardising certain pillars of international stability. In isolation, this increased risk of war around the globe is bad enough, but there are also certain types of cross-fertilisation between the disease and conflict, intensifying the threat. The ultimate dynamic of warfare and AIDS is that their combination makes both more likely and more devastating.
AIDS creates social instability, which causes conflict
Lawrence Gostin (law professor, Georgetown) 2000 THE AIDS PANDEMIC: COMPLACENCY, INUSTICE, AND UNFULFILLED EXPECTATIONS, p. 296
The security of countries and regions is affected because HIV/AIDS can have a destabilizing effect on society. HIV/AIDS creates poverty, a sense of vulnerability and hopelessness that feeds conditions leading to feuds, violence, and dislocation. In turn, wars and armed conflict exacerbate conditions of poverty, powerlessness, and social instability, all of which facilitate HIV transmission.
Instability created by AIDS leads to genocide, war, and conflict
American Health Line May 1, 2000
Worried that the AIDS epidemic could "topple foreign governments, touch off ethnic wars and undo decades of work in building free-market democracies abroad," the Clinton administration has formally declared the disease a threat to U.S. national security, the Washington Post reports. The declaration is part of a new U.S. effort to fight the disease abroad, sparked by intelligence reports last year predicting that "[d]ramatic declines in life expectancy" among those in African and other impoverished nations due to AIDS would provide a strong risk factor for "revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, genocides and disruptive regime transitions" (Gellman, Washington Post, 4/30). According to ABC's Martha Raddatz, the administration has declared that the "global death rate from HIV/AIDS is so overwhelming, the spread of infection so rapid and the consequences to national security so dire ... that the United States must in effect declare war on the disease"
AIDS Causes War
AIDS leads to a demographic shift, causing war, terrorism, and systematic instability
P. W. Singer is a Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brooking Institution. Survival, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 145–158 ©The International Institute for Strategic Studies. accessed 7-24-7
The AIDS epidemic also undermines security by creating new pools of combatants who are more likely to go to war. AIDS does not strike with equal weight across age groups. In a ‘unique phenomenon in biology’, the disease actually reverses death rates to strike hardest at mature, but not yet elderly, adults.36 The consequence is that population curves shift, eliminating the typical middle-aged hump, almost directly opposite to the manner of previous epidemics. Such demographic shifts have disturbing security implications. Recent research has found a strong correlation between violent outbreaks, ranging from wars to terrorism, and the ratio of a society’s young male population in relation to its more mature segments.37 Above a ratio of roughly 40 post-adolescent men to every 100 older males, violent conflict in a society becomes far more likely. In several states that are already close to this dangerous threshold, AIDS will likely tip the balance. Young men, psychologically more aggressive under normal circumstances, compete for both social and material resources, and are more easily harnessed to conflict when they outnumber other generational groups. Demagogues, warlords and criminals find it easier to recruit when the population is so distributed. Riots and other social crises are also more likely. Whatever the reason for the correlation, this worrying pattern has held true across history, from ancient times to recent outbreaks of violence in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Congo. The new demographics of AIDS will also heighten security risks by creating a new pool of orphans, magnifying the child-soldier problem. By 2010, over 40m children will lose one or both of their parents to AIDS, including one-third of all children in the hardest-hit countries. These include 2.7m in Nigeria, 2.5m in Ethiopia and 1.8m in South Africa.38 India, a country in which AIDS is not yet considered to have reached crisis levels, already has 120,000 AIDS orphans. The stigma of the disease, as well as the sheer numbers of victims, will overwhelm the communities and extended families that would normally look after them. This cohort represents a new ‘lost orphan generation’.39 Its prospects are heartrending, as well as dangerous. Besides being malnourished, stigmatised and vulnerable to and sexual abuse, this mass of disconnected and disaffected children is particularly at risk of being exploited as child soldiers. Children in such straits are often targeted for recruitment, either through abduction or voluntary enlistment driven by desperation. With recent changes in weapons technology that allow them to be effective fighters in low-intensity warfare, children represent an inexpensive way for warlords, guerrilla groups and other violent non-state actors to build up substantial forces.40 This new ease of force generation means a likely increase in the number of internal rebellions and conflicts. Moreover, the doctrine behind the use of child-soldiers makes these conflicts inherently nastier. Such wars predominantly feature attacks on civilians, and atrocities are an inherent part of recruiting and indoctrination. At the same time, the lives of the child-soldiers themselves are considered cheap by those who utilise them; they tend to be deployed in a less disciplined manner, making their own losses much higher. Finally, the existence of child-soldiers is damaging to social fabric as well as their individual psyches, creating future problems down the road. Child soldiers have appeared on contemporary battlefields without AIDS being present. The prevalence of a new, globalised mass of orphans, as well as a hollowing of local states and militaries, will make them more widespread. As a result, violent conflicts will be easier to start, greater in loss of life, harder to end and will lay the groundwork for their recurrence in succeeding generations.
AIDS Cause Civil War
AIDS spread will devastate the effectiveness of African militaries, causing civil wars
Erica Barks-Ruggles (International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution) April 2001 “Meeting the Global Challenge of HIV/AIDS: Why the United States Should Act Quickly.”
Militaries, composed largely of young men who are far from home and frequently exposed to danger, are at especially high risk for HIV infection. African nations have done little to address the threat that HIV/AIDS poses to military personnel. Only spotty reporting of HIV prevalence in militaries is available, and only a handful of countries say they test some troops. Tests in 1999 on a limited number of South African troops participating in a regional exercise showed that 17 percent of those tested were infected. In June 2000, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo acknowledged that as many as 11 percent of that nation's troops participating in operations in Sierra Leone might be HIV-positive. If African nations are unable to maintain professional, well-trained militaries, the threats from rebel movements as well as internal problems in militaries will be more difficult to contain.
AIDS Causes Terrorism
Rampant AIDS spread desocializes youth and makes them easy recruits for terrorism. Sub-Sahara is an important front in the war on terror
Fitzhugh Mullan (Professor of Prevention & Community Health @ George Washington University) 2005 “Healers Abroad: Americans Responding to the Human Resource Crisis in HIV/AIDS”, Pg. 93-94
Geopolitical security. HIV/AIDS will continue to be a destabilizing force in the world for decades to come. The infection is already eroding state capacity in sub-Saharan Africa (an important front in the war on terror), where 70 percent of currently infected patients reside. By 2010, 20 million children in Africa will have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Orphans and desocialized youth are especially vulnerable to exploitation in civil conflicts. Significant rates of HIV/AIDS in military populations also impact the ability of affected countries to safeguard their national interests and participate in regional peacekeeping. For this and other reasons, HIV/ AIDS is a threat to regional, global, and U.S. security that merits major investments in human capital, as well as in drugs and technology.
AIDS undercuts the stability of state systems which are critical to preventing the spread of terrorism and prevent the spread of conflict
Mark Schneider and Michael Moodie (CSIS Analysts) 2002 THE DESTABILIZING IMPACTS OF HIV/AIDS,
Weakened militaries leave a vacuum, at home and abroad, which gangs, terrorist organizations, and guerrilla groups will be only too tempted to fill. Military officials from Nigeria to Congo confirm that high rates of HIV/AIDS affect military readiness—and, what is worse, encourage risk-taking and inappropriate behavior among soldiers who believe they have already received a death sentence. There are concerns, as well, about maintaining command and control within a weakened and inexperienced officer corps. This security weakness also undermines the ability of the international system to end conflicts and prevent them from spreading. HIV/AIDS poses a particular threat to international peacekeeping for several reasons. First, troops serving in peacekeeping missions have been found to be as much as five times more at risk for contracting HIV, and thus pose a risk for spreading the disease once they return home. Second, peacekeeping forces have been accused of acting as agents for spreading HIV/AIDS in countries from Sierra Leone to Cambodia—with the result that their presence is considerably less welcome among the people they are intended to help. Finally, HIV/AIDS is wreaking havoc on the militaries of African countries that are traditional mainstays of international peacekeeping; in South Africa, for example, military analysts have suggested that the country may soon be unable to send troops abroad. Americans have been made keenly aware in the past year of the importance of stable, successful states for fighting extremism and preventing terrorist groups from establishing bases with impunity. As the U.S. military keeps a watchful eye on Somalia, the threat of state failure elsewhere in Africa is more real, and more significant, than ever. Likewise, the loss of African peacekeeping forces, and Africa’s ability to help maintain its own stability, will cost the United States and our allies significantly.
AIDS Causes Terrorism
AIDS cause terrorism and wars in which the US will be drawn into
By Greg Behrman “A subversive plague : AIDS threatens global security”, International Herald Tribune
Saturday, July 10, 2004
On Sunday, epidemiologists, scientists, public health experts and leaders of nongovernmental organizations will convene in Bangkok for the 15th International AIDS Conference. They will debate the costs and the prevention strategies; they will report on progress in the science. Yet one of the most important dimensions of this pandemic will be almost entirely overlooked: that it is fast becoming one of the greatest threats to U.S. and global security.
In the past 20 years, approximately 60 million people have been infected with HIV; 20 million have died. Eight thousand people — nearly three times 9/11's death toll — die of AIDS every day. By 2010, experts predict 100 million infections worldwide and 25 million AIDS orphans.
AIDS has taken its greatest toll in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is there that the pandemic presents the most immediate threat to global security. AIDS is killing the most productive and needed people: doctors, government officials, teachers. The disease is not only devastating families and communities; it is eviscerating national economies.
All seven southern African countries have adult infection rates above 17 percent, and in two it is 35 percent. Some employers train two or three workers for every job, such are the chances that a worker will become infected and die. Some African armies are believed to have infection rates as high as 50 percent.
The implications for global security are profound. AIDS can reverse the strides many African countries have made toward democratization. Warlords, corrupt dictators and rogue leaders might seize power in weakened states. Lawlessness and disorder can breed violence and conflict.
By 2010, 25 percent of U.S. oil imports are expected to come from Africa, so the United States will be increasingly drawn in to participate in combat and peacekeeping missions there.
In 2002, the White House National Security Strategy declared that for the first time, weak states pose a greater danger to U.S. national security than strong states. What is making states weak today? In sub-Saharan Africa, it is AIDS.
Somalia, Sudan and Kenya have already provided harbor for terrorists. As the disease tears the sub-continent's states apart, terrorists will find more refuge in the rubble. Though there are more Muslims in Africa than in the entire Middle East, Islamic radicalism is still the exception rather than the rule. But the instability and suffering that AIDS is spreading through the continent might well feed radicalism.
AIDS Causes Failed States
AIDS leads to failed states, causing economic decline, war, and terrorism
P. W. Singer is a Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brooking Institution. Survival, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 145–158 ©The International Institute for Strategic Studies. accessed 7-24-7
AIDS threatens not just the military but the whole state. As the disease spreads and becomes ever more pervasive, ‘it destroys the very fibre of what constitutes a nation: individuals, families and communities, economic and political institutions, military and police forces’. The manner in which AIDS can hollow out already weak states parallels its effect on militaries. In contrast to other epidemics, which tended to kill off the weak and infirm first, AIDS in the developing world tends to claim the lives of the more productive members of society, who are not easily replaced. Educated and well-off citizens are more mobile, and thus have often contracted the disease first. Many states have clusters of the disease in the middle and upper levels of management in both business and government, and AIDS is already being blamed for shortages of skilled workers in a number of countries.24 For example, 10% of all African teachers are expected to die from AIDS by 2005, while between 25–50% of health-care workers in stricken states such as Malawi will similarly die from the disease.25 In the words of Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, the UN organisation concerned with AIDS’ global impact, the disease ‘is devastating the ranks of the most productive members of society with an efficacy history has reserved for great armed conflicts’. The impact is felt not just in governance, but also in economic and social development. Besides acting as a new sort of tax on society, by increasing the health-care costs of business across the board, the disease also discourages foreign investment. Workforce productivity decreases, while revenues go down as the local consumer base is impoverished.27 The disease increases budgetary needs at the same time as it shrinks the tax base. The consequences could well be shattering for already impoverished states. The World Bank considers AIDS to be the single biggest threat to economic development in Africa: it is expected to reduce GDP in many states by as much as 20%, in just the next decade. The rapid spread in poverty-stricken post-Soviet states, including those in Central Asia newly important to the war on terrorism, could be equally catastrophic. The precise security threat here is that AIDS causes dangerous weaknesses in the pillars of an otherwise stable state: its military; its governing institutions and economy. The disease is accordingly no longer just a symptom but a fundamental catalyst of state crisis.29 As public institutions crumble and senior officials succumb to the disease, public confidence in governing bodies is further threatened. The weakening of state bodies at points of crisis has repeatedly been the spark for coups, revolts and other political and ethnic struggles to secure control over resources. As the recent collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) illustrates, warlords, plunderers and other violent actors will move in to fill the void left by a failing state. That the disease is concentrating in areas already undergoing tenuous political transitions – such as Africa and the former Soviet Union – only heightens the risk of instability and state failure. The security danger presented by failed states extends beyond the simple human tragedy played out in the ensuing chaos and collapse. While stable states outside the region might imagine themselves secure and able to stand aside from failed states, the realities of the global system no longer permit this. Major powers have clear national interests in many of the regions most vulnerable to state failure generated or exacerbated by disease. The US, for example, has economic investments in at-risk areas in Africa that are, by some measures, comparable to investments in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. Equally, a number of individual states at risk, such as Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa, are core regional allies, as well as critical suppliers of oil (roughly one-fifth of all US imports) and strategic minerals. The threats of economic and political collapse from the disease can also lead to new refugee flows. Besides facilitating the spread of the disease, the sudden and massive population movements such collapses provoke have led to heightened region-wide tension and destabilisation.33 With AIDS likely to reach pandemic levels in the Caribbean and former Soviet Union, American and European governments will have to prepare for refugee crises reminiscent of the Haitian collapse and Balkan wars of the 1990s. The more direct security threat is that failed states can become havens for the new enemies of global order. As the UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi noted, the events of 11 September were ‘A wakeup call, [leading many] … to realize that even small countries, far away, like Afghanistan cannot be left to sink to the depths to which Afghanistan has sunk’.34 Decaying states give extremist groups freedom of operation, with dangerous consequences a world away. This hazard applies even to seemingly disconnected state failures. Sierra Leone’s collapse in the 1990s, for example, certainly was of little concern to policy-makers in Washington and had little connection to radical Islamic terrorist groups. Evidence has since emerged, however, that the tiny West African country is connected to al-Qaeda fundraising efforts involving the diamond trade.35
AIDS Causes Genocide
AIDS causes genocide and rape
P. W. Singer is a Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brooking Institution. Survival, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 145–158 ©The International Institute for Strategic Studies. accessed 7-24-7
The AIDS virus represents not only a new weapon of war, but one that makes the impact of war all the more catastrophic and enduring. AIDS has created a new tie between rape and genocide. Rape itself is certainly nothing new to warfare. In the last decade, however, it has become organised for political and strategic purposes.43 In Bosnia there were camps designated for the purpose, while in Rwanda between 200,000 and 500,000 women were raped in a few short weeks. The introduction of AIDS makes such programs a genocidal practice.44 The chance of disease transmission is especially high during rape, due to the violent nature of the act. It appears that rape is now being intentionally used to transfer AIDS to target populations. In the conflicts that have taken place over the last years in the Congo, for example, soldiers deliberately raped women of the enemy side with the stated intention of infecting them.45 Their goal was to heighten the impact of their attacks and create long-lasting harm. Similarly, in Rwanda, soldiers taunted women after raping them: ‘We are not killing you. We are giving you something worse. You will die a slow death’.46 Likewise, the disease’s spread to rural areas in Sierra Leone came from the thousands of women raped and infected by the Revolutionary United Front.
AIDS Collapse Healthcare Infrastructure
AIDS is responsbile for a collapse of the health care infastructure in many african countries
AVERT, Averting HIV and AID’S, July 12th, 2007 (Accessed 7/23/07, Google, , GC)
In all affected countries the AIDS epidemic is bringing additional pressure to bear on the health sector. As the epidemic matures, the demand for care for those living with HIV rises, as does the toll among health workers. In sub-Saharan Africa, the direct medical costs of AIDS (excluding antiretroviral therapy) have been estimated at about US$30 per year for every person infected, at a time when overall public health spending is less than US$10 per year for most African countries. The Effect on Hospitals As the HIV prevalence of a country rises, the strain placed on its hospitals is likely to increase. In Sub-Saharan Africa, people with HIV-related diseases occupy more than half of all hospital beds. 4 Government-funded research in South Africa has suggested that, on average, HIV-positive patients stay in hospital four times longer than other patients. It is predicted that patients affected by HIV and AIDS will soon account for 60-70% of hospital expenditure in South Africa. Hospitals are struggling to cope, especially in poorer African countries where there are often not enough beds available. This shortage results in people being admitted only in the later stages of illness, reducing their chances of recovery. As the epidemic worsens, more complex cases of HIV and AIDS are likely to arise, taking up more hospital time and further reducing the standard of care provided.
Health Care Workers While AIDS is causing an increased demand for health services, large numbers of healthcare professionals are being affected by the epidemic. Botswana, for example, lost 17% of its healthcare workforce due to AIDS between 1999 and 2005. A study in one region of Zambia found that 40% of midwives were HIV-positive. Healthcare workers are already scarce in most African countries. Excessive workloads, poor pay and the temptation of migrating to richer countries once trained are factors that have played a role in this shortage.
Although the recent increase in the provision of antiretroviral drugs (ARVS, which significantly delay the progression from HIV to AIDS) has brought hope to many in Africa, it has also put increased strain on healthcare workers. Providing ARV’s requires more time and training than is currently available in most countries – for instance, in Tanzania it has been estimated that providing treatment to all those who need it would require the full-time services of almost half the existing health workforce.
AIDS Cause Orphans
HIV/AIDS increases orphans
Lester Brown Earth Policy Institute, PLAN B 2.0 – RESCUING A PLANET UNDER STRESS AND A CIVILIZATION IN TROUBLE, 2006, p. 105
The epidemic is leaving millions of orphans in its wake. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have 18.4 million "AIDS orphans" by 2010—children who have lost at least one parent to the disease. There is no precedent for millions of street children in Africa. The extended family, once capable of absorbing orphaned children, is now itself being decimated by the loss of adults, leaving children, often small ones, to take care of themselves. For some girls, the only option is what has come to be known as "survival sex." Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post writes from Swaziland, "In the countryside, teenage Swazi girls are selling sex—and spreading HIV—for $5 an encounter, exactly what it costs to hire oxen for a day of plowing
AIDS Causes Food Shortages
AIDS undercuts farm production which lead food shortages and famine
Nicolas Cook Congressional Research Service, “AIDS IN AFRICA”, May 5 2006,
AIDS’ severe social and economic consequences are depriving Africa of skilled workers and teachers, and reducing life expectancy by decades in some countries. There are an estimated 12.3 million African AIDS orphans. They face increased risk of malnutrition and reduced prospects for education. AIDS is blamed for declines in farm production in some countries and is seen as a major contributor to hunger and famine
HIV/ AIDS is increasing poverty amongst its victims as well as crippling the economies of African nations through the loss of skilled workers, causing food shortages and a strained health care system.
HIVInSite May 2006 “Regional Overview”
In sub-Saharan Africa’s high-prevalence countries, the epidemic has made a serious impact on households and communities. Studies show these countries losing on average between 1% and 2% of their annual economic growth as a result of the epidemic. HIV-affected households appear more likely to suffer severe poverty than non-affected households and older parents who lose adult children to HIV are exceptionally prone to destitution. HIV is also intensifying chronic food shortages by causing farm labor losses and depleting family income that would normally be used to purchase food. Southern African countries are already facing a growing human-capacity crisis, losing skilled staff essential for governments to deliver vital public services, and HIV is exacerbating this situation. In addition, the epidemic has contributed to rapid health-sector deterioration by increasing burdens on already-strapped systems and steadily depriving countries of essential health-care workers.
HIV has far worsened the food crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.
The New Times “Rwanda; Food Crisis: Worsened By Aids” Lexis. October 14, 2005 Ac:7/10/07
The mighty and the powerful, the poor and the rich, intellectuals and peasants, all have a time when they only mind how to put food on the plates of their family members. The intermittent alternations of famine and abundance have for long been tied to weather failures, precipitated by droughts and floods. But today a mere drought does not necessarily warrant famine, neither is it the only cause of famine in, especially, Sub-Saharan Africa. As we celebrate the World Food Day tomorrow, we need to reflect on the devastations visited upon Africa by famine and Aids The depredations of war, the unpredictability of crop failure, the invasion of locusts in some countries and the ravages of Aids all do come into play to worsen the already deep food crisis. Aids, especially, has aggravated the food crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa. Latest statistics show over half of those with HIV/AIDS live in rural areas, where stricken families struggle to produce enough food to survive. Once a largely urban problem, AIDS has moved to rural areas in developing countries, devastating thousands of farming communities and leaving impoverished survivors scarcely able to feed themselves. The disease is no longer a health problem alone, but is having a measurable impact on food production, household food security and rural people's ability to make a living
AIDS Destroys Agriculture
AIDS undermines agriculture production
GAO (General Accounting Office) 2001 U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT FIGHTS AIDS IN AFRICA, BUT BETTER DATA NEEDED TO MEASURE IMPACT
The agriculture sector has also been affected by the epidemic. Agriculture, the biggest sector in most African economies, accounts for a large portion of economic output and employs the majority of workers. However, as farmers become too ill to tend their crops, agricultural production declines for the country. For example, according to UNAIDS, in Côte d’Ivoire, many cases of reduced cultivation of crops such as cotton, coffee, and cocoa have been reported. Likewise, in Zimbabwe, agricultural output has fallen by 50 percent over a 5-year period during the late 1990s, due in part to farmers becoming sick and dying from AIDS.
AIDS undercuts agriculture production
Dr. Rene Loewenson (Director, Training and Research Support Centre in Zimbabwe) and Professor Alan Whiteside (Director of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at University of Natal South Africa) 2001 “HIV/AIDS Implications for Poverty Reduction”, UNITED NATIONS DEVELPMENT PROGRAMME POLICY PAPER, Date Accessed 7/9/2007,
The effect of HIV/AIDS on households is profound, but neither appreciated, nor generally measured. Lost income, and the diversion of assets to caring for those affected, impoverishes families. AIDS causes labour to be lost or diverted from production to care. There is evidence of falling production in the agricultural sector. In Ethiopia, labour losses reduced time spent on agriculture from 33.6 hours per week for non AIDS-affected households to between 11.6 to 16.4 hours for those affected by AIDS. In Zimbabwe, while adult deaths from all causes led to small farm maize outputs to fall by 45%, when AIDS was the cause of death this increased to 61%. AIDS generates new poverty as people lose housing tenure and employment. In Zambia, AIDS led to a rapid transition from relative wealth to relative poverty in many households. In two thirds of families where the father died, monthly disposable income fell by more than 80 percent. In Botswana, it was estimated in 2000 that the number of households living below the poverty line would rise by up to 8 percent over the next ten years due to AIDS, while household per capita income would fall by up to 10 percent. The poor are hardest hit: While on average every two income earners would have one extra dependent, the poorest households, those in the lowest quartile of per capita household income, would have four additional dependents as a result of AIDS, and their average incomes would fall by between 10 and 15 percent.
AIDS destroys agriculture sectors
Alexander Irwin (Faculty at Institute for Health and Social Justice at Harvard University) 2003 GLOBAL AIDS: MYTHS AND FACTS: TOOLS FOR FIGHTING THE AIDS PANDEMIC, p. 138-40
One of the economic sectors most gravely threatened by HIV/AIDS is agriculture. Particularly in regions like Africa, agriculture's role in economic development and health is critical. In some countries, agriculture directly generates only 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but agricultural work directly or indirectly provides livelihoods for as many as 80 percent of the population. Meanwhile, disruption of food production can have devastating long-term consequences for all aspects of health by undermining the nutritional status of a population. Worldwide, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), seven million farm workers have died of AIDS-related causes since 1985, and 16 million more are expected to die in the coming 20 years. Rising mortality among young farm workers has disrupted the transmission of agricultural knowledge and land management skills from one generation to the next. When a farm worker becomes ill, labor-intensive cash crops are often neglected as the family concentrates its efforts and resources on providing care for the sick member.13 Other family members may have to repeatedly take time away from their farming work to accompany the sick person to a medical clinic or traditional healer. When the patient's condition worsens during key phases of the agricultural cycle, such as clearing, sowing, or harvest, both the sick person's absence and the work time lost by caregivers can lead to irrecoverable losses in production. A recent survey in the rural Bukoba district of Tanzania found that women whose husbands were sick spent 60 percent less time on agricultural activities than they ordinarily would. In Thailand, about one-third of rural households that had experienced an AIDS-related death reported that their agricultural production dropped by half, with a similarly drastic decrease in household income. After farm family breadwinners fall ill, subsistence food must be purchased, and family members may even have to sell off farm equipment or household goods to survive. The sustainability of livestock suffers. Often, animals are sold to pay for funeral expenses, to support orphaned children, or because there is no one to look after them.
AIDS Creates Gender Hierarchies
HIV/AIDs epitomizes gender inequalities and perpetually keeps women in a lower social status
Julia Cabassi, December, 2004 (The NGO HIV/AIDs Code of Practice Project, “Renewing Our Voice”, July 23, 2007, CB)
Women and girls bear a large proportion of the burden of AIDS care, both in the formal care sector and informally in communities. This often leads to girls having to leave school, women having diminished opportunities for economic independence, and women living with HIV/AIDS struggling to meet their own as well as their families’ care needs, all of which further entrenches gender inequities
AIDS Causes Malaria
HIV/AIDs Triples the Risk of Malarial Infections in Populations
The Monitor, March 16, 2007 (Africa News, “Study Doubts High HIV Rates in IDP Camps”, July 23, 2007
Unexpectedly high levels of HIV infection are being found among adults seeking treatment for malaria in Uganda. More than 30 per cent of adults showing up at district health centers with uncomplicated malaria were found to be co-infected with HIV. Clinical treatment for malaria was three times more likely in adults with HIV. The findings are in line with a growing body of evidence from elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa that malaria tends to occur with increased frequency and severity in HIV- infected adults. Dr Madra explained that people with HIV are more prone to related diseases like malaria. "When the immune system is suppressed, those diseases manifest themselves. People are always getting malaria."
AIDS Causes TB Spread
AIDS weakens the immune system, increasing TB infections
Dr. Robert Rothberg (Harvard Medical School) 2007 AFRICA: PROGRESS & PROBLEMS -- AIDS & HEALTH ISSUES, p. 15
Africa’s third largest killer disease, tuberculosis (TB), has reemerged on the continent because of HIV/AIDS. Weakened immune systems have been unable to fend off growing tuberculosis bacterial infections. The number of tuberculosis cases in Africa has increased fivefold since AIDS was first identified in the early 1980s. The rapid course of TB has been relentless: the number of annual deaths from the disease in Africa exploded from 200,000 in 1990 to 540,000 in 2005. Today, tuberculosis in Africa accounts for 25 percent of the world’s cases, and that percentage is increasing.
AIDS increase the spread of TB infections
Ruth Levine What Works Working Group, MILLIONS SAVED: PROVEN SUCCESSES IN GLOBAL HEALTH, 2004, p. 32
HIV/AIDS and TB are now a particularly deadly combination. Because HIV weakens the immune system, it raises the likelihood of latent TB becoming active. Consequently, TB is the leading causes of death among HIV-positive people and accounts for approximately 11 percent of all AIDS deaths world-wide. As the number of people infected with HIV increase, so will the number of active TB cases.
AIDS increase the lethality of TB
Joia S. Mukherjee (MD, MPH Medical Director Partners In Health) 2007 CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, March 21,
Though extremely difficult, it is possible to treat highly drug- resistant TB. With political will, meaningful partnerships, training of health workers (including at community level) and investments in laboratory and health infrastructure, it can be done. The new twist is that when HIV and TB collide--especially when HIV and drug-resistant TB collide--there is an even more urgent need to intervene effectively because HIV speeds up the process and makes epidemics of TB, especially drug-resistant TB, faster and more lethal.
AIDS Should Be Security Issue
AIDS should be framed as a security issue
Susan Peterson (associate professor at the college of william & mary) “epidemic disease and national security”, security studies 12, no. 2 (winter 2002/3)
These pronouncements echo a decade of books and essays that warn of the dangers of IDs and call for “a fundamental reconceptualization of standard definitions of national and international security.”4 Nevertheless, the promise of systematic analysis of the link between IDs and security remains largely un- fulfilled.5 Most scholars and practitioners who explore the link between disease and security do so from within the “human security” tradition, which seeks to expand the concept of security beyond the state to include basic human needs like health. Their arguments remain at the margins of the security literature, however, because their appeal to human security does not resonate with more traditional approaches to national and international security, which focus on physical threats to the state. As Daniel Deudney writes, “Not all threats to life and property are threats to security. Disease, old age, crime and accidents rou- tinely destroy life and property, but we do not think of them as ‘national secu- rity’ threats or even threats to ‘security’…. If everything that causes a decline in human well-being is labeled a ‘security’ threat, the term loses any analytical usefulness and becomes a loose synonym of ‘bad’.”6 Historians should find such reasoning puzzling, since epidemic disease has shaped human history, generally, and military conflict, in particular.7 Thucy- dides describes how, during the Peloponnesian Wars, disease demoralized the Athenian people, undermined the political leadership, and weakened the army, preventing it from achieving key military objectives.8 More than 2,300 years later, the 1918 influenza epidemic killed 25 million people, including 500,000 Americans. The Spanish flu struck 294,000 allied troops in the fall of 1918 alone. Nearly 23,000 died, and the disease caused significant, if short-lived problems on both the allied and German sides.9 It seems clear, in short, that catastrophic IDs like AIDS can and have threatened national security.
***Mutations***
AIDS Can Mutate
Failure to combat AIDS will trigger mutations in the disease that will trigger faster transmissions and increase its lethality
Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (Professors of Population studies at Stanford University) THE POPULATION EXPLOSION, 1990, p. 147-8
Whether or not AIDS can be contained will depend primarily on how rapidly the spread of HIV can be slowed through public education and other measures, on when and if the medical community can find satisfactory preventatives or treatments, and to a large extent on luck. The virus has already shown itself to be highly mutable, and laboratory strains resistant to the one drug, AZT, that seems to slow its lethal course have already been reported." A virus that infects many millions of novel hosts, in this case people, might evolve new transmission characteristics. To do so, however, would almost certainly involve changes in its lethality. If, for instance, the virus became more common in the blood (permitting insects to transmit it readily), the very process would almost certainly make it more lethal. Unlike the current version of AIDS, which can take ten years or more to kill its victims, the new strain might cause death in days or weeks. Infected individuals then would have less time to spread the virus to others, and there would be strong selection in favor of less lethal strains (as happened in the case of myxopatomis). What this would mean epidemiologically is not clear, but it could temporarily increase the transmission rate and reduce life expectancy of infected persons until the system once again equilibrated. If the ability of the AIDS virus to grow in the cells of the skin or the membranes of the mouth, the lungs, or the intestines were increased, the virus might be spread by casual contact or through eating contaminated food. But it is likely, as Temin points out, that acquiring those abilities would so change the virus that it no longer efficiently infected the kinds of cells it now does and so would no longer cause AIDS. In effect it would produce an entirely different disease. We hope Temin is correct but another Nobel laureate, Joshua Lederberg, is worried that a relatively minor mutation could lead to the virus infecting a type of white blood cell commonly present in the lungs. If so, it might be transmissible through coughs.
The spread if HIV/AIDS risk mutations, this risk extinction
Susan Hunter (an independent consultant to certain agencies of the United Nations) 2003 BLACK DEATH: AIDS IN AFRICA pp. 12-13
Unless we act, the future is not bright. Although medical science responded rapidly in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, progress in developing a cure or a vaccine has come to something of a standstill. In fact, halfway through the world's most promising vaccine trials, the disease mutated and recombined, forcing stunned scientists to modify the vaccine and hope for the best.' Besides an impressive ability to mutate, AIDS may behave like other epidemic diseases have in the past, mutating like syphilis did in the 1500s, taking other internal and external forms, and switching the manner in which it is transmitted. Imagine, for a moment, if AIDS became a respiratory infection and could be transmitted by a sneeze like the bubonic plague did when it became the Black Death in 1347. "No rule of nature contradicts such a possibility," says Joshua Lederberg, former president of Rockefeller University. "The proliferation of AIDS cases with secondary pneumonia multiplies the odds of such a mutant, as an analogue to the emergence of pneumonic plague."
AIDS transmission increases will lead to the creation of super viruses
Abu-Raddad (HIV/AIDS research scientist in the Hutchinson Center's Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington) 2007 AIDS Weekly, “Study shows malaria may fuel spread of HIV which may boost malaria infection rates in Africa”, l/n
"We can reduce HIV/AIDS transmission by concomitantly treating HIV/AIDS co-infections with malaria as well as other diseases." "The global public-health system's failure to deal with the challenge of HIV/AIDS contributes directly to its failure to tackle other public-health challenges such as malaria and tuberculosis," Abu-Raddad said. "As long as HIV/AIDS continues to spread, it will aggravate the difficulties we face with these other diseases and may contribute to the emergence of more lethal or drug-resistant strains of these infections," Kublin added.
AIDS Can Mutate
HIV has been know to mutate at a rapid pace. It is only a matter of time before HIV mutates into an airborn disease. Mutation means that HIV becomes contagious like a cold, spreading rapidly and causing extinction.
B.W. Holmes, Social Sciences, 1998 [Balance of Nature; Accessed 23 July 2007; rs_text2.htm#part%202; EN]
The second potential result of the imbalance in the ecosystem is more immediate: nature may simply plague man with a disease that he is unable to stop. There is evidence that this process is already under way. Viruses are mutating at a rate never seen before; even old, previously controllable, diseases have been changing to deadlier forms. Many infectious diseases have recently evolved a resistance to antibiotics. There is more and more crossover between man and other creatures: originally, HIV/AIDS only infected Green monkeys. It would take a relatively minor change in a deadly infectious disease to wipe out humanity. Let's use HIV/AIDS as an example; as it has shown a remarkable ability to mutate in a very short period of time. HIV, once contracted, can take months to become detectable; allowing an infected person to unknowingly spread the virus to other people. When the individual develops AIDS, it can take many years to die of it; meanwhile, they are still infectious. Now, let us assume HIV mutates into a form that can survive in the mucus present in the respiratory tract: that it becomes capable of "hitching a ride" on the water vapor in the lungs, and is transmitted in the same way as the common cold, or influenza. What if a sneeze in a crowded subway car could infect all of the passengers with HIV, who would then carry on for months, unaware of the infection, spreading the virus in similar ways. An infected person would then linger for years, not simply avoiding intimate contact with others; but having to avoid all contact: isolated from humanity. How long would it take before the entire human race was infected? How could you possibly stop it? Variations on this example can be applied to any number of viruses. Man has been racing to stay ahead of nature, but we are unlikely to win every contest; one slip, and the race is lost.
Due to population size HIV/AIDS is becoming more able to adapt and mutate.
James Mullins (Ph.D. in Cell biology and professor at the University of Washington) March 2004 "Influence of Random Genetic Drift on Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 env Evolution During Chronic Infection". . July 23 2007. mp
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) has high replication and mutation rates that generate large census populations and high levels of genetic variation. We examined the roles of natural selection, population growth, random genetic drift, and recombination in shaping the variation in 1509 C2–V5 env sequences derived from nine men with chronic HIV-1 infection. These sequences were obtained from clinical visits that reflect the first 6–13.7 years of infection. Pairwise comparisons of nonsynonymous and synonymous distances, Tajima's D test, Fu and Li's D* test, and a test of recurrent mutation revealed evidence for episodes of nonneutral evolution in a total of 22 out of 145 blood samples, representing six of the nine individuals. Using three coalescent-based maximum-likelihood estimators, we found virus effective population sizes in all nine individuals to be 105 based on rare haplotype frequencies decreases to ?FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=~"103 upon correcting a biased sampling procedure. We conclude that the genetic variation in these data sets can be explained by a predominance of random genetic drift of neutral mutations with brief episodes of natural selection that were frequently masked by recombination.
HIV/AIDS is mutating and evolving to more effectively evade the human immune system.
Science Daily July 20, 2001. "Minor Mutations In HIV Virus Have Major Impact". July 23 2007.. mp)
"The virus is gradually evolving and learning how to evade the immune system," says the senior author of the study Bruce Walker, MD, of the Partners AIDS Research Center at MGH. "This study shows for the first time that minor mutations in the virus can have a major impact on the ability of the immune defenses to recognize it." When HIV infects a cell, the cell alerts the immune system that it contains a foreign invader by displaying viral protein fragments on the cell surface. This is a suicide signal that alerts the immune system to kill the infected cell. The immune response that is generated is dependent on the ability to recognize the displayed HIV fragment. Walker and his colleagues have found that the virus can mutate these targeted regions and in doing so evade this attack
AIDS Goes Airborne
AIDS could mutate and go airborne, risking extinction
Dr. Tom Kerns November 23, 1999 "AIDS and Apocalyptics for Questioning Millennium Madness." Lecture from Introduction to Medical Ethics course.
"Whatever else AIDS is, it's not just another disease." (Dr June Osborne, former member of the US Presidential Commission on HIV/AIDS) Features that make AIDS unique: * High morbidity & mortality * Lifelong infectiousness * lengthy asymptomatic stage * highly mutable virus Joshua Lederberg considers the possibility of HIV "learning the tricks of airborne transmission: "We know that HIV is still evolving. Its global spread has meant there is far more HIV on earth today than ever before in history. What are the odds of its learning the tricks of airborne transmission? The short answer is "No one can be sure." ... [A]s time passes, and HIV seems settled in a certain groove, that is momentary reassurance in itself. However, given its other ugly attributes, it is hard to imagine a worse threat to humanity than an airborne variant of AIDS. No rule of nature contradicts such a possibility; the proliferation of AIDS cases with secondary pneumonia [and TB] multiplies the odds of such a mutant, as an analog to the emergence of pneumonic plague."
Disease Mutation Cause Extinction
Disease outbreaks and mutations risk extinction
South China Morning Post 1996 (January 4, “Leading the way to a cure for AIDS”)
Despite the importance of the discovery of the "facilitating" cell, it is not what Dr Ben-Abraham wants to talk about. There is a much more pressing medical crisis at hand - one he believes the world must be alerted to: the possibility of a virus deadlier than HIV. If this makes Dr Ben-Abraham sound like a prophet of doom, then he makes no apology for it. AIDS, the Ebola outbreak which killed more than 100 people in Africa last year, the flu epidemic that has now affected 200,000 in the former Soviet Union - they are all, according to Dr Ben-Abraham, the "tip of the iceberg". Two decades of intensive study and research in the field of virology have convinced him of one thing: in place of natural and man-made disasters or nuclear warfare, humanity could face extinction because of a single virus, deadlier than HIV. "An airborne virus is a lively, complex and dangerous organism," he said. "It can come from a rare animal or from anywhere and can mutate constantly. If there is no cure, it affects one person and then there is a chain reaction and it is unstoppable. It is a tragedy waiting to happen." That may sound like a far-fetched plot for a Hollywood film, but Dr Ben -Abraham said history has already proven his theory. Fifteen years ago, few could have predicted the impact of AIDS on the world. Ebola has had sporadic outbreaks over the past 20 years and the only way the deadly virus - which turns internal organs into liquid - could be contained was because it was killed before it had a chance to spread. Imagine, he says, if it was closer to home: an outbreak of that scale in London, New York or Hong Kong. It could happen anytime in the next 20 years - theoretically, it could happen tomorrow. The shock of the AIDS epidemic has prompted virus experts to admit "that something new is indeed happening and that the threat of a deadly viral outbreak is imminent", said Joshua Lederberg of the Rockefeller University in New York, at a recent conference. He added that the problem was "very serious and is getting worse". Dr Ben-Abraham said: "Nature isn't benign. The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary programme. Abundant sources of genetic variation exist for viruses to learn how to mutate and evade the immune system." He cites the 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreak as an example of how viruses have outsmarted human intelligence. And as new "mega-cities" are being developed in the Third World and rainforests are destroyed, disease-carrying animals and insects are forced into areas of human habitation. "This raises the very real possibility that lethal, mysterious viruses would, for the first time, infect humanity at a large scale and imperil the survival of the human race," he said.
War Causes AIDS Mutations
War causes AIDS spread and mutations
P. W. Singer is a Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brooking Institution. Survival, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 145–158 ©The International Institute for Strategic Studies. accessed 7-24-7
Disease has always been part of the true cost of war.47 Epidemics decimated armies throughout ancient and biblical times and continued to do so well into the nineteenth century. Most of the combatant deaths during the Napoleonic Wars were from typhus. In the Crimean War, the Russians killed only a tenth as many British troops as did dysentery. Similar ratios held in the American Civil War. The links between AIDS, militaries and warfare may make twenty-first century conflict no different. Of the countries with the highest infection rates in Africa, half are involved in conflict.48 And during war, as noted above, infection rates within militaries often escalate. The rates within the seven armies that intervened into the Congo are estimated to have reached as high as 50–80%.49 All these soldiers will die from the disease, making AIDS far more costly in lives than the limited combat that took place. Such infected forces typically leave a swathe of disease in their wake. The original spread of infection in East Africa can be traced back to the movements made by individual units of the Tanzanian Army.50 Moreover, the conditions of war hinder efforts to counter the disease’s spread. In Sierra Leone and the Congo, for example, all efforts at AIDS prevention were put on hold by the breakdown of order during conflict.51 Valuable windows of opportunity to arrest epidemics before they reach critical stages are lost. Wars also lead to the uprooting and amalgamation of populations, bringing groups into contact that otherwise would be unlikely to mix. In the Congo war, for example, soldiers from all over Africa converged, while civilians from rural provinces were brought into urban centres. Such mixing promotes mutations in the virus itself. Researchers have found that the conflict in the Congo has created a veritable witch’s brew of AIDS, bringing together various strains from around the continent. The resulting new strains are called ‘strange recombinants’. One scientist noted, ‘We are seeing variants [of HIV] never seen before’.52 The consequences reach far beyond the scope of the fighting. For those countries who can afford them, the recent development of new multi-drug therapies (‘cocktails’) have cut the risk of death from AIDS, leading many in the US to think that the disease is, in a sense, cured. Yet, there always remains the possibility of far more dangerous HIV strains: resistant to these latest treatments or even airborne. HIV has always displayed a high rate of genetic mutation, so this may happen regardless of wars or state collapse. That said, if such deadly new strains show up one day in the US or Europe, the multiple linkages of AIDS and warfare mean that its origin will likely be traced back to some ignored and faraway conflict.
AIDS Will Not Mutate
The mutation level of HIV to AIDS is virtually zero.
DAVID RASNICK, Biochemist PhD, President: Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, August, 1996, “INHIBITORS OF HIV PROTEASE USELESS AGAINST AIDS,” , date accessed: 6/25/07
I reminded him that in order for an HIV protease to produce a new virus, it had to cleave eight different substrates, and pointed out that the ability to cut just one of those substrates did not represent the overall ability of the enzyme to produce HIV. Yet he was claiming that some of these resistant proteases were as much as 90% effective when compared to non-mutated protease. But these claims of high effectiveness were always for just one of the eight substrates. In every case, the effectiveness on the other substrates was absurdly low, numbers like 0.1%, or 0.01%, or even 0.001%. In order to calculate the total effectiveness of these mutant proteases, you must multiply together all eight percentages. And when you multiply even a very large percentage like 90% by a bunch of tiny percentages like 0.1%, what you end up with is essentially zero. In other words, these drug-resistant proteases were effectively non-functional. They could NOT produce viruses.
HIV Lacks the Viral Strength to Develop AIDS
DAVID RASNICK, Biochemist PhD, President: Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, August, 1996, “INHIBITORS OF HIV PROTEASE USELESS AGAINST AIDS,” , date accessed: 6/25/07
I'm glad I pulled out of the race for HIV protease inhibitors. It wasn't long before I had serious doubts about the viral hypothesis of AIDS. I spent countless hours, as did many scientist throughout the world, devising ingenious explanations for how the so-called AIDS virus (HIV) destroyed the immune systems of its victims. By the end of 1985 the number of exotic hypotheses necessary to account for HIV being the sole cause of AIDS convinced me that something was fundamentally wrong with the basic assumptions that had become entrenched in the mega-institutions of science and medicine. The more I examined HIV, the less it made sense that this wimpy virus could cause such devastation. Sometime in 1987 I realized that HIV could not cause AIDS. Although I couldn't prove that HIV was innocent at that time, I could show that the arguments for its guilt were unconvincing, though at the time I still thought AIDS might be infectious.
Mutation theory is a myth.
DAVID RASNICK, Biochemist PhD, President: Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, August, 1996, “INHIBITORS OF HIV PROTEASE USELESS AGAINST AIDS,” , date accessed: 6/25/07
The vogue explanation for the failure of the inhibitors to benefit AIDS patients is that HIV replicates so fast that it eventually develops mutant forms of protease that resist the inhibitors. Even to this day, however, no one has ever found a resistant HIV protease in any patient, even in patients that are claimed to have them! The only inhibitor-resistant HIV proteases anybody has ever examined are those produced in the lab using genetic engineering. Nevertheless, the mutation explanation, just like the HIV theory itself, was completely accepted--without question--as soon as it was proposed.
Aids Not Go Airborne
AIDS won’t go airborne – it’s an inefficient way to infect immune cells
Feinberg 2001 (Judith, Medicine@UCincinatti, “Ask the experts about opportunistic infections,” June 25 )
HIV is not airborne and is unlikely to become so. Its biology is oriented toward infecting a certain type of white blood cell. being inhaled into the lungs isn't a very efficient way of encountering T helper lymphocytes. This concern is the result of someone's fears getting the best of them.
HIV can’t survive outside of the body making airborne spread impossible
Ticknor 2005 (Christine- Professor of Molecular Biology at Yale, Ask a Science, “AIDS and survival in air,” March 7 )
HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is an enveloped virus. That means it's surrounded by a lipid membrane. In other words, it's wearing a coat of the same material that surrounds living cells. That's sturdy enough inside a body, but not outside in the rest of the world. If the virus should be coughed into the air, or spilled onto a surface like a toilet seat, it would not survive long enough to infect anybody.
There is zero evidence that suggests AIDS will go airborne
Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking 2005 University of KwaZulu-Natal,
As HIV/AIDS is a viral disease, how long will it take before the virus changes its shape and become airborne? There is no evidence to suggest that HIV will mutate and become an airborne pathogen. Simply due to the fact it is a virus, does not mean that this would occur. Multiple viruses require contact for transmission and are not spread via the airborne/inhalation route (e.g.: herpes, HPV, etc….).
***Refugees***
AIDS Not Cause Refugess
Displaced Refugees Do Not Have Higher Rates of HIV/AIDs, AIDs does not lead to Refugees
The Monitor, March 16, 2007 (Africa News, “Study Doubts High HIV Rates in IDP Camps”, July 23, 2007
A new HIV/Aids survey has cast doubt on the widely-held assumption that internally displaced persons and refugees are more likely to be HIV-infected than people in ostensibly more stable settings. The findings are contained in the latest World Report on HIV/Aids, which goes on to warn that there is a possible erosion of the gains Uganda made against Aids in the 1990s because HIV prevalence has again been rising in some rural areas. Despite the warning, the report by the U.N. Programme on HIV/Aids (Unaids) and the World Health Organization shows that after having receded during the 1990s, the epidemic in Uganda has stabilized overall. The report is the most comprehensive survey compiled from national data. Previous reports had indicated that war-torn northern Uganda had the highest HIV prevalence in the country. However, in northern Uganda, which is home to an estimated 1.4 million internally displaced persons, "the HIV prevalence rate is just over 8%," the report says.
Refugees Spread AIDS
Refugees spread and contract AIDs easily, especially in areas disrupted by war or other conflicts
Julia Cabassi, December, 2004 (The NGO HIV/AIDs Code of Practice Project, “Renewing Our Voice”, July 23, 2007, CB)
The spread of HIV/AIDS across communities, countries and continents is testimony to linkages between population movement and the growing epidemic. There is increasing recognition that the mobility of people, whether displaced by conflict or natural disasters, or to access work, can create particular kinds of vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and its consequences.56 People move, voluntarily and involuntarily; temporarily, seasonally and permanently. Mobility increases vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, both for those who are mobile and for their partners back home. Migrant and mobile workers57 are often more vulnerable to HIV infection because of isolation resulting from stigma and discrimination and differences in language and culture; separation from regular sexual partners; lack of support and friendship; and lack of accessto health and social services.58 Where these factors are combined with lack of legal protection, vulnerability to HIV infection is further increased. Effective responses to the vulnerability of mobile populations must include cross-border and regional responses, involving partners in source, transit and destination countries; culturally and linguistically appropriate outreach programmes;and advocacy efforts to protect and promote the human rights of, and where necessary improve the legal status of, migrant and mobile workers.
Refugees are at high risk for AIDs and for expended displacements which are common, the risk is greater
Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, US State Department, February 2006 (House Report 109-152, “Report on Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons - The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief”, July 23, 2007, CB)
Extended displacement and the disruption of refugees’ lives can put them at increased risk for HIV/AIDS, due to factors such as exposure to sexual violence, economic vulnerability, and increased contact with surrounding populations with higher HIV prevalence. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that, on average, refugees will spend seventeen years outside of their home country.1 Approximately eighty percent of refugees are women and children. Considering the economic, social, and health risks that accompany displacement, HIV/AIDS services are important in order to protect refugees as well as people in host communities and countries of return.
Refugees Not Spread AIDS
There is no Data that refugees are caused by or have higher rates of HIV/AIDs
Paul Speigel [Medical Doctor MPH and Hélène Harroff-Tavel BSc] January 2006 (UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency, “HIV/AIDS and Internally Displaced Persons
in 8 Priority Countries”, July 23, 2007, CB)
In conclusion, there are insufficient data to conclude how conflict and internal displacement affect HIV prevalence. Statements that conflict increases HIV transmission among IDPs or that IDPs consistently have higher HIV infections than the general population are not supported by data. Overall, most of the 8 priority IDP countries have a relatively low HIV prevalence compared to surrounding countries in their respective region. The overall dearth of data on HIV interventions, prevalence and behaviour among IDPs shows that governments, UN agencies and NGOs have not prioritized this area. Comprehensive HIV multi-sectoral assessments among IDPs are needed to provide data to direct programming and to serve as a baseline to allow for the monitoring and evaluating their effectiveness. Serial HIV prevalence and behavioural surveillance studies are needed among IDPs. These surveys should have a sufficient sample size to allow for the disaggregation of results according to displaced and non-displaced populations as well as gender and age
AIDS Not Cause Extinction
Although AIDS may be a lethal virus, it does not pose any danger to the extinction of humans.
Richard A. Posner, judge on U.S. court of appeals for seventh circuit, University of Chicago Law School professor; 01-Jan-2005 [Catastrophe: the dozen most significant catostrophic riskes and what we can do about them; Accessed July 23, 2007; ; EN]
Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events . There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus , wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race.
***AIDS Answers***
AIDS Exaggerated
AIDS statistics are wrong- Reported cases are way overestimated
The Nation November 16, 2000
Statistics quoted by most development agencies suggest millions of Kenyans are sick and dying. Expert opinion is questioning the authenticity of these figures. About thirty per cent of all Kenyans (8.4 million) are infected with tuberculosis, with about 16,700 dying every year. Seventy per cent or 20 million are exposed to malaria every year with 26,000 children below five years dying every year (or 72 children a day). More than 2.2 million Kenyans are infected with HIV, with 240,000 dying every year from Aids Between 20 and 30 per cent of Kenyans are either suffering from typhoid or are carriers of the disease, of which a third (over 1.9million) eventually die even after seeking medical treatment. The figures are far much above the official figures given by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Take for instance Aids. According to the estimates, it is said to be killing 182,500 people annually. The total reported deaths, from all causes, by CBS were 185,576 in 1997 and 221,543 in 1998. Consequently this would mean only about 3000 people died from other causes than Aids in 1997. The head of Health Information Systems at the Ministry of Health Mr. Godfrey M Baltazar says of the quoted HIV/Aids cases: "These estimates are subject to wide margins of error. They are based on blood samples taken from pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in a few sentinel sites, all of which are in urban areas and assumed to be representative of the entire Kenyan population, which they are not. Their extrapolation to non-pregnant women, males and the rural population are based on assumptions which have little empirical foundation." Until mid this year, Mr. Baltazar was an epidemiological officer at National Aids and STI Control Council ( NASCOP) . He argued that in the absence of a population or community survey, these figures cannot be accepted as credible. Kenya has not done any. "Such surveys are very critical as this is the only way to validate the data." Health statistics estimated are mainly done by the WHO. It is said that after the ministry forwards the figures to WHO. The latter will then subject the data to farther mathematical processes, apparently to take care of the 'low under- reporting rates' of government agencies. This has in the past created glaring discrepancies between government figures and those floated by private or non- governmental agencies. This argument is strongly supported by Prof Charles Geshekter of California State University, USA who accuses the players for deliberately adopting very misleading ways of determining HIV cases in Africa that generate very wrong and scary figures. In Africa, the Western public officials determine the presence of Aids based on a set of symptoms rather than on the confirmation by blood testing, the standards used in America and Europe. In Africa, Aids is defined, according to WHO, as a combination of fever, persistent cough, diarrhoea and a 10 per cent loss of body weight. "It is impossible to distinguish these common symptoms from those of malaria, TB or the indigenous diseases of the impoverished lands." argues Geshekter
AIDS Not Cause Extinction
AIDS will stabilize, not cause extinction
Susan Hunter (an independent consultant to certain agencies of the United Nations) 2003 BLACK DEATH: AIDS IN AFRICA, p. 214
History tells us that epidemics last a long, long time. HIV/AIDS will be around for at least the next two or three hundred years, so management policies must keep this in mind. The trajectory of HIV/AIDS growth that started in the late 1980s will continue until the middle of the twenty-first century, with peaks occurring at different times in different places. Then, after a long plateau, there will be a long drop, and AIDS will stabilize worldwide at a lower level and be with us permanently as an endemic, chronic disease.
AIDS is self-correcting – high infection rates cause decline because of awareness
2005 (“Aids around the world,” november 24 )
It has also been noted that a country with a very high HIV prevalence rate will often see this rate eventually stabilise, and even decline. In some cases this indicates, among other things, that people are beginning to change risky behaviour patterns, because they have seen and known people who have been killed by AIDS. Fear is the worst and last way of changing people's behaviour and by the time this happens it is usually too late to save a huge number of that country's population.
AIDS won’t cause extinction – it’s not that kind of virus
Preston 1995 (Richard, New Republic, “the plague year,” July 24 l/n)
Some of the blame for this transformation clearly belongs with aids, the epidemic that has more or less shattered the public's confidence in the power of science. But aids has never been seen as a threat to the entire species. In fact, aids is exactly the opposite of the kind of random, uncontrollable epidemic that seems to have now seized the popular imagination. The truth is that it is very hard to find an adequate explanation for the current American obsession. Joshua Lederberg's comment that we are worse off today than a century ago is proof only that he is a better student of microbiology than of history.
AIDS will not cause extinction- THAT IS A SCIENTIFIC FACT
George Caldwell (PhD in Biology and Political Science) 2003
Disease could wipe out mankind.[sic] It is clear that HIV/AIDS will not accomplish this – it is not even having a significant impact on slowing the population explosion in Africa, where prevalence rates reach over thirty percent in some countries. But a real killer plague could certainly wipe out mankind. The interesting thing about plagues, however, is that they never seem to kill everyone – historically, the mortality rate is never 100 per cent (from disease alone). Based on historical evidence, it would appear that, while plagues may certainly reduce human population, they are not likely to wipe it out entirely. This notwithstanding, the gross intermingling of human beings and other species that accompanies globalization nevertheless increases the likelihood of global diseases to high levels.
AIDS can’t cause extinction – it will kill everyone susceptible to it then go away
Preker 2004 (Alexander et. Al, Human development network, “addressing hiv/aids in east asia and the pacific,” )
As can be seen, in the initial period of R0 > 1, the prevalence increases exponentially. However, as the number of people susceptible to the disease are “used up” by the epidemic, the reproductive rate begins to fall. If no new susceptible groups enter the population, then the infection will fade away. Given the long duration of HIV/AIDS, there is continuing growth in new susceptible populations, making extinction unlikely.
AIDS Not A Killer
All of their reasons why HIV and AIDS are devastating are proof that the connection is fabricated.
James DeMeo, Ph.D., director of Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, 1993 "HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS: A Summary of Current Research Findings" accessed 6/27/2007
A) The advocates of the HIV hypothesis suggest HIV is significantly different from all other viruses in that the presence of antibody alone is sufficient to predict the future development of deadly AIDS symptoms. In all other diseases, however, the presence of antibody in the absence of active virus is a clear sign that the individual's immune system has been exposed to the virus, but successfully responded to it, and defeated it. One is considered "immune" for development of the disease, or from further exposure to that infectious agent. With HIV, however, we are asked to suspend this well-known immunological response, and believe that the presence of antibody alone is synonymous to a death sentence. B) HIV=AIDS advocates counter that the virus goes into "hiding" within certain cells of the body, and remains dormant for many years until such time that something triggers them into activity, after which symptoms appear. However, they fail to demonstrate this part of their hypothesis; the "hiding places" have not been demonstrated to any degree of significance. In fact, this absence of demonstrated "hiding viruses" was a major stumbling-block to the general theory of viral causation of diseases. The viral hypothesis of AIDS likewise suffers from this difficulty.
Slow spread of HIV cells proves it is not deadly.
James DeMeo, Ph.D., director of Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, 1993 "HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS: A Summary of Current Research Findings" accessed 6/27/2007
E) HIV does not readily or quickly kill the t-helper blood cells, which act as its host. It appears to infect those cells only with great difficulty, and once having infected them, lives quietly and uneventfully within those cells for their normal lifetime, without proliferating significantly to other cells and tissues. As Duesberg points out, this is the precise nature of a retrovirus, which does not kill its host cell, and leads a rather quiet existence in the organism. By contrast, viruses which produce deadly symptoms proliferate rapidly, infecting many cell types, and they kill the infected cells, thereby producing acute symptoms. Active virus is spread widely in such a virus-sickened organism and is not difficult to identify or locate. HIV does none of this, and for this reason, Duesberg suggests it is probably a perinatally-transmitted retrovirus which has been within a small percentage of the human race for generations, but without any associated pathology. HIV was observed for the first time only in recent years, because the technology to identify and search for retroviruses was developed in recent years. In a few cases, evidence suggests HIV might produce mild flu-like symptoms within 24-48 hours after infection to a new organism, but after that it has no additional affect upon the individual.
Bad science also implicates their impact claims.
Gary Null November/December 1995 "HIV Equals AIDS and Other Myths of the AIDS War" PENTHOUSE MAGAZINE accessed 6/27/2007
Nonetheless, a lot is happening behind the scenes. Journalist Neville Hodgkinson writes in The Sunday Times of London that challengers of the original hypothesis are growing in number because after 11 years of work on H.I.V., AIDS researchers have failed to show how the virus could be doing the damage attributed to it. The link between H.I.V, and AIDS is not as close as once believed, and doomsday predictions about its spread have collapsed.
More evidence
Gary Null November/December 1995 "HIV Equals AIDS and Other Myths of the AIDS War" PENTHOUSE MAGAZINE accessed 6/27/2007
Third, predictions based on the H.I.V. theory have failed spectacularly. AIDS in the United States and Europe has not spread through the general population. Rather, it remains almost entirely confined to the original risk groups-mainly sexually promiscuous gay men and drug abusers. The [rate] of H.I.V.-infected Americans has [increased more slowly] instead of increasing rapidly as predicted, which suggests that H.I.V. is an old virus that has been with us for centuries without causing an epidemic."
AIDS Not Cause Failed States
No proof that AIDS leads instability or failed states
Colin Mcinnes (specialises in strategic studies and in health and international relations) “HIV/AIDS and security” International Affairs 82, 2 (2006) 315-326 © The Royal Institute of International Affairs 2006.
the argument that HIV/AIDS may prove politically destabilizing is much more speculative and arguably an example of worst-case thinking. In particular, there is no empirical analysis to date suggests that HIV/AIDS has led to an increased risk of conflict in a country.14 Indeed, evidence for many of the claims as to why HIV/AIDS might prove destabilizing appears to be lacking.15 The argument, for example, that high HIV prevalence rates might produce a disaffected group prone to criminal violence and capable of undermining the state remains contested. On the contrary, evidence to date suggests that states are coping with increased criminality from HIV. Direct evidence that young people with HIV become fatalistic, prone to violence and susceptible to ‘entrepreneurs of violence’ is lacking.16 Nor is it clear in what ways high HIV prevalence will transform societies, what intervening variables will determine the nature of such transformations, or how significant such transformations will be.17 For example, there appears to be a fundamental disagreement over how instability might occur. For some, economic collapse and poverty create the potential for political violence to flourish;18 for others, the issue is one of weakening institutional structures creating a ‘fading state’ which would go out not with a bang but with a whimper. This disagreement reveals the difficulty in establishing a causal link between HIV/AIDS and state failure. A more nuanced attempt at establishing a relation- ship is the Jaipur paradigm of Tony Barnett and Alan Whiteside. This begins by making a distinction between susceptibility (those factors that make a society more or less likely to experience high prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS) and vulnerability (the extent to which a society will be affected by HIV/AIDS). Crucially, vulnerability is not determined by susceptibility, but by two other factors: social cohesion, and the level and distribution of wealth and income.20 If this model is correct, then large numbers of states that have a high prevalence of HIV may not be at risk from instability.
AIDS Not Cause War
No causal link between war and AIDS
Colin Mcinnes (specialises in strategic studies and in health and international relations) “HIV/AIDS and security” International Affairs 82, 2 (2006) 315-326 © The Royal Institute of International Affairs 2006.
Despite the strength of this consensus, there is growing evidence that the link between conflict and the spread of HIV is far from straightforward. In some long conflicts (for example, that in Angola) HIV prevalence changed little, while a number of more recent conflicts have seen HIV prevalence reduce, suggesting conflict may actually limit the spread of HIV. Moreover, if conflict isolates regions and reduces movement of people, then one of the most significant vectors for the spread of the disease—human mobility—is directly inhibited. Nor are refugee camps necessarily catalysts for an increase in HIV prevalence. In some camps, better health education, together with improved security preventing sexual exploitation or abuse, may act to reduce the spread of HIV. Nor is the end of conflict the end of the problem: increasingly it is apparent that the post-conflict phase may witness increased prevalence as confidence returns, mobility within a region increases and foreign workers begin to appear (as has happened in Mozambique, Angola and Afghanistan). The epidemiology of HIV/AIDS and conflict therefore appears to be complex. Although a key variable appears to be differences in HIV prevalence between people in the conflict region and troops or humanitarian workers from outside the region—if one is high and the other low, then conflict may act as a vector for the disease—even this is only one variable in a complex mix.48 Nor is conflict the only vector for the disease. Côte d’Ivoire in the 1990s, for example, was relatively peaceful and stable, but nevertheless experi- enced increased HIV prevalence; in Asia, trade, drug use and human trafficking (including for the sex industry) appear to be much more significant vectors than conflict; in China, a key vector may prove to be the blood supply; while in the former Soviet Union drug use is a major cause of HIV infection.49 Thus an overriding focus on conflict as a vector for HIV not only oversimplifies the epidemiology of the disease but may lead to other major vectors being ignored or not given sufficient attention.
***Alt Causes***
Poverty Causes AIDS
Poverty has a direct link to the rise in hiv/aid’s in sub-saharan africa.
Desmond Cohen, Senior Adviser on HIV and Development, 2006 (“Poverty and Aid’s In Sub-Saharan Africa”, Issue No. 27, Accessed 7/23/07, , GC)
The characteristics of the poor are well known as also are some of the causal factors at work which contribute to a "culture of poverty" - the fact that the children of the poor often become the poor of succeeding generations. Poverty is associated with weak endowments of human and financial resources, such as low levels of education with associated low levels of literacy and few marketable skills, generally poor health status and low labor productivity as a result. An aspect of the poor health status of the poor is the existence amongst many Africans of undiagnosed and untreated STDs which is now recognized as a very significant co-factor in the transmission of HIV. Poor households typically have few if any financial or other assets and are often politically and socially marginalized. These conditions of social exclusion increase the problems of reaching these populations through programs aimed at changing sexual and other behaviors. It is not at all surprising in these circumstances that the poor adopt behaviors which expose them to HIV infection. It is not simply that IEC activities are unlikely to reach the poor (which is too often the case) but that such messages are often irrelevant and inoperable given the reality of their lives. Even if the poor understood what they are being urged to do it is rarely the case that they have either the incentive or the resources to adopt the recommended behaviors. Indeed to take the long-view in sexual or other behaviors is antithetical to the condition of being poor. For the poor it is the here and now that matters, and policies and programs that recommend deferral of gratification will, and do, fall on deaf ears. Even more fundamental to the condition of poverty is social and political exclusion. So HIV-specific programs are neglectful of the interests of the poor and are rarely if ever related to their needs, and also unfortunately are other non-HIV related program activities -- such as those relating to agriculture and credit. More generally it is the absence of effective programs aimed at sustainable livelihoods which limit the possibilities of changing the socio-economic conditions of the poor. But unless the reality of the lives of the poor are changed they will persist with behaviors which expose them to HIV infection (and all the consequences of this for themselves and their families). Two examples of this state of affairs will perhaps suffice to indicate how poverty leads to outcomes which expose the poor to HIV. Firstly, poverty -- especially rural poverty, and the absence of access to sustainable livelihoods, are factors in labor mobility which itself contributes to the conditions in which HIV transmission occurs. Mobile populations, which often consist of large numbers of young men and women, are isolated from traditional cultural and social networks and in the new conditions they will often engage in risky sexual behaviors, with obvious consequences in terms of HIV infection. Secondly, many of the poorest are women who often head the poorest of households in Africa. Inevitably such women will often engage in commercial sexual transactions, sometimes as CSW but more often on an occasional basis, as survival strategies for themselves and their dependents. The effects of these behaviors on HIV infection in women are only too evident, and in part account for the much higher infection rates in young women who are increasingly unable to sustain themselves by other work in either the formal or informal sectors.
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