42 million and counting

Try something: look around and pick out one third of the people you can see at this moment. Tell them that you know how they are going to die, and that it is going to be excruciating, prolonged and beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated Western medicine. We're pretty good at poo-pooing what is occurring with AIDS right now in Southern, Central, and Western Africa, but there are a good number of countries, including Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe, where the above exercise would be devastatingly accurate.

For the brief time I spent in South Africa and Zimbabwe this past summer, I tried not to think about it in those terms. I did not want to play the numbers game; I preferred to pose questions to NGO workers and political leaders on the theoretical plane, as if we were somehow immune to it all. It hurt when I really thought about it.

So why care? India is making its own generic anti-retrovirals (the only type of pharmaceutical consistently effective at extending the life of AIDS victims significantly), Bush has just pledged $15 billion towards a global AIDS fund, Bill and Melinda Gates are funding 15 percent of the AIDS program operating budget in Botswana -- we're on the ball, right? And besides, what does Africa have to do with us?

My response, I will admit, is biased: I am becoming increasingly incapable of thinking in terms of 'national interest' without thinking in terms of human interest. I cannot make an argument that given our miniscule portion of foreign investment in the African continent, even a dramatic collapse of economic viability would seriously threaten our own economy. Nor can I claim that it is of vital security interest. A great ocean and a greater gulf of power separate us for the foreseeable future.

Rather, I implore you to think in broader terms. We are too lucky, too fortunate not to be doing more. Nicholas Eberstadt wrote in Foreign Affairs one year ago that the death tolls currently being seen in Africa are likely to be paled by those to come out of India, China and Russia in the coming generation as the epidemic spreads. If such predictions ring true, we will be looking at nearly a quarter of the population of the planet being either directly or indirectly affected. I believe this is an opportunity, in the grandest sense, to make good on our espoused liberal claims that we of Western, European stock are no different, fundamentally, from our brethren. We do have a moral obligation to utilize (CUT2) our expansive resources and stop something that kills so discriminately, bludgeoning the world's most marginalized and defenseless sub-populations.

There exists no "magic bullet"; AIDS and its associated shockwaves are too sophisticated for that. And I don't expect everyone to rise up en masse, get doctorates, and move to Africa or work the World Health Organization. Oddly enough, caring, really caring, can be enough. Our legislators like being elected, and our appointed government officers like to keep them happy. All of these people might be more than obliged to start looking empathetically at our common human vulnerability if we, the voting, cranky, impatient populace, say that it matters. Many of us will go our lives unscathed by this historically unrivaled plague; we will not have to face orphaned children, daily, whose eyes scan for a reason. But we will all feel hurt, and we will all see loved ones fall ill, and we will all feel it our right to have the legions of innovation deployed to remedy it all. It is no more our right than any other's; let our international biomedical moral relativism be washed away by genuine tears of human compassion. Without it, the death march will only carry on.

J. Jeremy Sueker is a sophomore majoring in International Relations and Community Health.