SA youth lead unsafe revolution against HIV

Lungi Langa

5 August 2010

A Times article recently revealed important information about the significant strides made in halting the spread of HIV. And, this appears to be a revolution led by the youth.

According to the article the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) released information that the rate at which HIV is spreading among youth aged 16 and 25 rapidly decreased in countries worst affected by HIV. Most of the countries managed to reduce infection by 25%.

“Young people have shown that they can be agents of change in the prevention revolution,” the report said.

Botswana, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia and Zimbabwe reached the Millennium Development Goal to reduce the HIV prevalence among youth aged 15 to 24 by 25%. Burundi, Lesotho, Swaziland, the Bahamas and Haiti were tipped to achieve the goal fairly soon.

Some of the key drivers to reaching the declines were changes in sexual behaviour, delay in sexual debut and partner reduction. Safer sex also played a significant role, with 10 countries reporting increased condom use among women, 13 countries reporting increased condom use among men and a further three reporting increased use among both sexes.

However, the report also reminds us that there are still 33.4 million people living with the disease and up to 5.7 million of those infected live in South Africa.

Reader comments on the article, however made me question what kind of revolution the youth were really leading against HIV.

Many of the comments made HIV an issue of race and a matter of cultural identity as posters entirely overlooked the cross-cultural aspects of the disease. They seemed to believe firmly that only a certain race could be infected with HIV and ignored the reality that although the epidemic is more comment in certain socio-economic settings it remains colour-blind.

As a young South African who has seen people of every race infected and affected by the disease I find such thinking puzzling. I still cannot understand what could push young South Africans who have virtually unrestrained access to information to hold on so feverishly to such thinking.

One poster even hailed the thinking of former president Thabo Mbeki and argued: “rolling out anti-retroviral toxic” would only make matters worse. Another reader commented that in his research he had “discovered [that] in fact garlic, lemon and olives do actually kill the virus”. He then referred readers to a various dubious websites that “proved” the credibility of this information.

Some of these are the oldest myths around about HIV. Most of them I’ve heard as a teenager growing up. It is sad that years after I have seen those myths demystified there is still a group of people who are being held hostage by the same thinking.

I cannot help but draw the conclusion that these few people partly demonstrate why South Africa continues to lag behind in reducing HIV infections.

When someone drew me a web of the sexual partners that he and friends were implicated in over a few months I nearly fell off my chair in shock. I could not believe the sheer size of that web – how many people had had some kind of sexual contact with each other even tough many had never met.

To me my friend was just one person, but if he was HIV positive at the time (he was having unprotected intercourse with some of the people in that web) then he would have infected some and they would in turn have infected others.

Another thing that became clear was that those who posted the comments were no longer concerned with the issue at hand – the growing AIDS pandemic claiming lives but they were more concerned with a bashing of personalities. They aimed to outsmart each other with every comment – often doing quite the opposite though.

Maybe that is the norm for posting comments in response to stories, but I think it fuels terrible myths and could be detrimental to reducing HIV infections. It would be misleading to create the idea that this select group of youth reflect the views of all the youth of South Africa.

However, it would be most unfortunate to not address this group of youth who clearly have a powerful medium to spread their dissident views about HIV.