Theater of the absurdZimbabwe's crisis lower rate of HIV infection
Zimbabwe has been in an economic and social free fall for a while: a third of the population has fled the country; unemployment is at 80 percent; the inflation rate can no longer be calculated; social services have collapsed; the one positive aspect of this catastrophe: men are short of money to pay prostitutes or be sugar daddies and keep mistresses, leading to a decline in the rate of HIV infection
There is always a silver lining — even in Zimbabwe, a country whose poor people have been subjected for three decades now to the brutal and capricious thuggery of the sclerotic and increasingly delusional President Robert Mugabe (he blames Zimbabwe’s problems on the Queen of England and the world’s gay rights movement). AP reports that fewer Zimbabweans are getting infected with AIDS, and researchers speculate it is due in part to a battered economy which is leaving men short of money to be sugar daddies and keep mistresses.
Presenting a study of the infection rate among pregnant women at a major international AIDS conference in South Africa this week, Dr. Michael Silverman said the prevalence of the virus that causes AIDS fell from 23 percent in 2001 to 11 percent at the end of 2008. His study was based on tests of 18,746 women at a prenatal clinic in rural Zimbabwe over that period. Silverman, a Canadian infectious disease expert, works at Howard Hospital in Zimbabwe, where the women were tested.
Silverman said he concluded that “a lot of the effect (of the decline in HIV infections) is from the collapsing economy.” AIDS experts have long noted that the richest countries in Africa are also those with the highest infection rates.
“You can’t pay the sex worker if you have no currency,” he said. “It’s hard to have a concurrent relationship if you’re always in earshot of your spouse, because you can’t afford to travel. Because of the economic collapse, people are forced to stay home, like being in quarantine.”
Getting accurate AIDS numbers in Africa, however, has been notoriously difficult since researchers are often forced to guess from imperfect indicators like HIV incidence in pregnant women, instead of counting actual numbers of HIV patients.
Researchers long have speculated how much they could drive down incidence of AIDS if people were constricted to having sex with partners in their age group. Now, in Zimbabwe, said David Katzenstein, a professor of infectious diseases at California’s Stanford University who has worked in Zimbabwe for 25 years, “everybody’s hungry, there aren’t as many sugar daddies (older men who attract young girlfriends with gifts and money) and those that are around don’t have as much sugar.”
“The good news from Zimbabwe is that, apparently without any intervention whatsoever, there does seem to be a declining incidence in young women and maybe young men,” said Katzenstein, who was not involved with Silverman’s
