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CARIBBEAN
Imperialists stand by as AIDS crisis grows
By
Melissa Kleinman
Published Dec 23, 2006 12:24 AM
In the year to come, thousands of Caribbean people will die of AIDS and
thousands more will become infected with the HIV virus. In just the past two
decades, over 6,000 AIDS deaths were reported in the Caribbean, but the actual
number is admittedly higher due to underreporting or misdiagnosis.
All the while, as people die and infection increases, imperialist governments
in the United States and Europe reveal their racism as they economically
strangle Caribbean countries such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They
offer no reparations for the centuries of damage and exploitation done to these
nations and peoples. Capitalist drug companies are even reluctant to provide
the desperately needed antiretroviral drugs that can improve the quality of
life and life expectancy for those living with HIV/AIDS.
In Haiti, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and Guyana, the AIDS
epidemic has spread beyond those called “high risk” to the general
population. This occurs once the infection rate in the general population
reaches approximately 5 percent. At such a rate the HIV virus spreads even more
rapidly.
AIDS is most devastating to Haiti, where 12 percent of the urban and 5 percent
of the rural population are estimated to be infected with the terrible
disease.
By the end of 1999, 83,000 children under the age of 14 had been orphaned by
AIDS in the Caribbean.
Furthermore, the AIDS epidemic is placing tremendous burdens on health care
systems and on the labor force. As of 2006, 83 percent of AIDS cases in the
Caribbean were found in the age group 15 to 54 years old, considered the prime
age span of the work force. This epidemic not only affects personal lives and
relationships but has the potential to negatively impact various key sectors,
from agriculture, tourism and
mining to trade, as well as national budgets.
In the Caribbean, AIDS is a “hurricane” disaster, said
Dominica’s Minister of Planning Artherton Martin in his closing statement
at a recent HIV/AIDS conference: “We must deploy against HIV/AIDS as we
would any other disasters. In fact, it is worse than hurricanes because it
destroys people, our most important resource.”
Haitians in Dominican Republic
Amelia Cayo, 53, who is part Haitian and a Creole speaker, is one of 43 AIDS
patients receiving free antiretroviral therapy from a clinic in the Dominican
Republic sponsored by Bateye Relief Alliance Dominicana, a nongovernmental
organization. She is one of many people who will be destroyed by AIDS if left
untreated. Like many victims to the virus, she is on a time-consuming regimen
of antiretroviral treatments, taking as many as four to seven different pills
three times a day.
Cayo comments, “I feel better since I started the pills, and you can be
sure I will keep taking them.” She and other descendants of Haitian
sugarcane workers are part of an estimated 200,000 residents of bateyes,
migrant worker communities adjacent to the mostly now-fallow sugarcane fields.
Before the opening of the center, the estimated 3,000 bateye residents in the
area received no medical care whatsoever.
There are currently only 3,500 people taking drugs, and they receive little or
no medical attention. Among the country’s bateye inhabitants, roughly 5
to 12 percent are HIV-positive. Alliance Executive Director María Virtudes
Berroa says sugarcane workers have been systematically excluded from the public
health system because of racial, economic and social discrimination.
The Bateye health group has already lost funding in education and prevention
programs for 30 bateye communities and at this point is reaching only a tiny
portion of the people with AIDS in the bateyes. Wendy Valdez, a physician in
the Cinco Casas bateye, said, “It would be disastrous if we had to
stop.”
It has been suggested that an individual could receive antiretroviral therapy
for less than $1 a day—which of course would exclude profits for the drug
companies. However, under common political and funding trends, including all
the programs underway and all the funds donated towards the Global AIDS effort,
these medicines reached fewer than 1 million people by the end of 2005.
Worldwide, including the Caribbean, 5 to 6 million people urgently need
antiretroviral treatment (ART), due to the severity of their illness, but only
300,000 people in developing countries receive these medicines. Many grassroots
efforts have shown that ART can be delivered in poorer countries as effectively
as developed countries. The World Health Organization says that increasing the
availability of antiretroviral therapy makes it more likely that people will
come forward for HIV testing, learn their status, receive counseling and care
and become knowledgeable about preventing the spread of the virus.
Nevertheless, by the year 2015 the Caribbean region stands to have nearly 3.5
million people living with the virus, according to UNAIDS.
Yet there is a small beacon of light in the Caribbean, 90 miles from U.S.
shores on the island of Cuba. The Cuban government has sent at least 4,000
doctors and health personnel to the poorest countries in the Caribbean, those
most hard hit by AIDS, with the idea of creating an infrastructure able to
provide the population with medications and the necessary follow-up.
(www.cubaweb.com)
The immediate ongoing need is for the international community to come forward
with the raw materials for further products and services. Yet, with the ongoing
war on people of color and the poor, what can Caribbean countries and
individuals like Amelia Cayo hope for from greedy capitalist nations?
Melissa Kleinman is a FIST member and a Denver public health care HIV/AIDS
worker.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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