The article’s concern is whether or not the
many
countries of Africa that accept outside financial aid to fund the many HIV/AIDS
programs have actually helped the overall healthcare system for that country,
or if it was just a fix for the HIV/AIDS epidemic itself. The answer is really undetermined, because no
one will really know how well each individual country has adapted to epidemic
response until the donor countries begin to retract their funds, which has
already begun to happen slightly. The amount
of money that was given to the continent as a whole is significant, “from 5.5
percent of health aid in 1998 to nearly half of it almost 10 years later.” That is a lot of money that each country
relies on to fund a various amount of its healthcare system, but the argument
remains that either the monies given to fight the epidemic has helped fund a
more equitable healthcare access within the countries, or that the monies did
nothing specific for the countries but help fight AIDS directly. During the initial response to the AIDS
epidemic donations were used to set up clinics to fight HIV/AIDS directly, and
did nothing for any other health institutions within the country. But, as the availability of antiretroviral
drugs became more available, and the amount of services being provided to
prevent the spread from mother to baby during pregnancy, the funding for
HIV/AIDS began to be used in other capacities that still supported the
epidemic, but also other health issues as well.
The only problem is that not every country might have taken part in
diverse use of the funds, and those countries are going to be the ones that
will suffer the most when the donor countries begin to heavily retract their
funds. The successes of the support to
fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa are true with the KwaZulu-Natal Province in
South Africa, one of the hardest hit regions of the epidemic, has seen an
increase in life expectancy of 11years since 2004, due to South Africa’s
antiretroviral program. Their program
already services around 1.7 million people with a plan to increase that number
by another 500,000 people over the next few years. There is no way that they
would be able to accomplish this with the impending plan for donated funds to
dry up for this to happen. So the
country of South Africa clearly has a plan to be more self-sufficient in their
healthcare system, and there are others like it.
Equality is a human right that the United Nations, in particular,
strives for the entire planet. No one
person should ever be oppressed for who they are, even if they were to have a
life threatening, contractible disease like HIV or AIDS. This equality was recognized in the 1990s
when the African continent was experiencing an AIDS epidemic. There may have been a fear of the AIDS virus
spreading to the rest of the world creating, quite literally, a global issue instead
of it being concentrated in one region, but none the less, equality of those affected
by the virus was an issue. There is no
doubt that monies in the support of the healthcare issues on the African continent
help, but is it really doing the individual countries any good that now, after
a significant time period, these countries should be able to supp[ort
themselves more, instead of looking for a handout. If the more developed countries continue to
fund the majority of these programs countries will never be independent and
will always feel some sort of obligation to the more developed ones, keeping a
gap between those who are perceived as privileged and those who are not. Again, equality is a human right, and that same
concept of equality applies not only to the individual, but a group, a region, a
country.
Matt Partridge
03/07/2013 at 7:39 pm
No comments:
Post a Comment