The Tufts HIV/AIDS Collaborative (THAC) gathered a distinguished group of experts, all affiliated with Tufts or the Fletcher School, for a panel discussion Thursday night entitled "Looking Back, Moving Forward: 25 years of HIV and AIDS."
The panel tackled the history of the AIDS epidemic, current initiatives to combat it and strategies to bring the disease under control in the future. Panelist Dr. Sherwood Gorbach, a graduate of the Tufts School of Medicine, called the audience of students and faculty in Braker 001 "the next generation of fighters in the long battle [against HIV and AIDS]."
About one million Americans currently have AIDS, more than ever before, according to sophomore Morissa Sobelson, co-chair of THAC.
In other parts of the world, especially in the 47 countries that make up sub-Saharan Africa, the problem of containing AIDS is even larger.
Gina Coplon-Newfield, Health Action AIDS director at Physicians for Human Rights, said that an additional 1 million health workers are needed in the region to properly control and treat the disease. Countries such as Malawi, for instance, only have one-tenth of the health workers they need to contain AIDS.
"[AIDS] is the worst public health pandemic the world has ever seen," Coplon-Newfield said.
Coplon-Newfield also remarked that the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa has led to a host of other problems, like violence and discrimination against women, discrimination against people living with AIDS and collapsing public healthcare systems unable to care for the poor and marginalized.
Kristy Hendricks, an associate professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, stressed that malnutrition plays a large role in the spread and severity of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Lack of food exacerbates the degenerative "wasting" effects of AIDS sufferers and often renders AIDS therapy, such as antiretroviral drugs, ineffective.
Antiretroviral drug provision is problematic as well.
Sasha Chanoff (F'04), a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, is the founder of Mapendo International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Kenya's more than 150,000 refugees. According to Chanoff, Kenya charges exorbitant rates for foreigners to acquire medical treatment.
Therefore, already destitute refugees end up living in camps without aid or healthcare, and the spread of AIDS within these camps often goes unchecked.
"These people are the most marginalized of the marginalized," Chanoff said.
The United States is taking steps in fighting the AIDS epidemic. During his terms, President George W. Bush has done more to combat global AIDS than any other U.S. president before him, Coplon-Newfield said.
Bush established the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a five-year program from 2003 to 2008 that will have treated 2 million people living with AIDS by its conclusion, in addition to preventing many more new AIDS infections.
Once PEPFAR concludes in 2008, however, new legislation will be required to reenact the U.S. government's AIDS initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa.
Gary McKissick, a professor in the community health program at Tufts, said it would be "impossible to imagine what the world would look like now without AIDS activism." He encouraged the audience to be realistic and to be strategic in their negotiations with governments and other organizations.
"You have to get to those folks that there are other reasons to do the right thing," McKissick said. "We've come a long way, but there's still a lot to be done."
For instance, in many states outside of sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is difficult to document. Gorbach is the principal investigator on a National Institute of Drug Abuse grant studying the habits of HIV-positive drug abusers in four cities in the United States, Vietnam, China and Argentina.
He said figures on AIDS infection remain unknown even in countries as large as India and China.
All panelists agreed that AIDS education is essential given the reach and gravity of the problem. Taiwo Oshodi (LA'04, M'05), a graduate of both Tufts University and the School of Public Health at Tufts Medical School, said universal testing for AIDS and HIV is the first and most important step in AIDS education.
"One-fourth of the 1 million Americans living with AIDS are not aware they are carrying it, because they have never been tested," Sobelson said.
"A lot of the things that these people are talking about are happening right here in the Boston area," Oshodi added. He works with the Boston Living Center, a nonprofit rehabilitation center for people living with AIDS.
By the end of this year, about 39.5 million people, adults and children alike, will be living with AIDS across the globe. According to Dr. Christine Wanke, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Tufts New England Medical Center, 12,000 previously healthy people are infected with AIDS every day, 2,000 of whom are under the age of 15.
"The numbers when you think about HIV are scary," Wanke said. "And they should be scary, because it's a big problem."
