Editorial: AIDS, a long road ahead

In America, where medication is readily available and long-term survivors like Magic Johnson are becoming more and more the norm, much of the dread that surrounded the disease when it first became part of the national vocabulary 25 years ago has dissipated. But as MHS students learned, that is hardly the case in other parts of the globe. Students viewed a documentary about their peers in South Africa, who do not even utter the word “AIDS.” They “do not name the thing [they] fear,” according to the documentary. In the same film, a South African minister notes that in one year, he performs 400 funerals and only four weddings.

The MHS program also featured presentations from MHS students Charlie Walker, Chris Conn and Kathryn Conn, who recently traveled to the KwaZulu Natal province in South Africa as part of partnership formed between the Pholela Parish in Africa and Marblehead’s Old North Church. We are grateful that MHS students had the benefit of such a meaningful commemoration of World AIDS Day.

For those of us who did not experience last Friday’s program, it is useful — if a bit discouraging — to note here, for all the advances in understanding and treatment of this awful disease, how far we haven’t come. Consider:

· For lots of reasons, jails and prisons are an incubator for HIV, yet little is being done to treat or educate this captive audience. The National Minority AIDS Council released a report this month calling for condoms to be distributed in prisons, but Massachusetts officials say they have no plans to consider such a thing.

· AIDS education has improved in public schools, but condoms remain controversial. It’s still easy to start an argument over whether schools should have a basket of condoms on the counter in the nurse’s office, but we’ve seen no progress on what should be a no-brainer: Installing condom vending machines in bathrooms at malls, arcades and other places teens hang out.

· Among gay American men, the entreaties for safer sex practices, so desperately voiced 20 years ago, have faded. According to some reports, a new generation of gay men, desensitized to the danger by treatments that have extended and improved the lives of AIDS patients, are far more casual about safer sex practices than those who went before them.

· According to the World Health Organization and other international agencies, the AIDS epidemic continues to spread in every region of the world. Since 1981, more than 65 million people have been infected with HIV and more than 25 million have died of AIDS. The WHO predicts that, at this rate, AIDS will kill 117 million people in the next 25 years.

There are thousands of people dedicated to controlling this modern plague, and therefore there is hope. But as we pass another World AIDS Day, we can’t help but wish we had more progress to report.