Ok...
Now, normally I don't like to hit on topics for my blog that are actually important to the flow of the universe, but this one struck me as needing to be posed.

AIDS

AIDS has grown to epidemic levels in Africa. But not just in the places where people live in mud huts and raise cows for a living, but in places like South Africa, where the quality of life matches us here in the United States, where people have cars and computers and televisions.

This is where I have problems. In the US, aids is an issue, with 890,000 (about 0.6%) adults afflicted in 2001. In that same year, South Africa had 4,700,000 (about 20.1%) adults with HIV/AIDS (Data from http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/). Now, this is in a country that has all the amenities that the US does, so all the sources of information are present, but they have 33 times more people per capita that are infected. How? Why?

I have no idea. I think that it's truely scary that a country that has information everywhere is capable of such a high contamination rate. Now I know that here in the US we're all germophobes, so we tend to obsess, but this disease is transmitted by only one of 2 ways: Sexual Contact and Blood-Blood contact. The flu here spreads like wildfire, but that spreads aierally, you can be infected by just being in a place where an infected person has been. But with AIDS, it is perfectly safe to be roommates with the person. Now that's not wholly true, because their weakened immune system can allow their body to be used as a breeding farm for some diseases that are usually squashed by normal immune systems and thus are only availible in small amounts, but in large quantities can overwealm a healthy immune system. But AIDS itself is REALLY hard to spread. Sleeping around and sharing needles are basically the only ways to spread the disease to more than one person (Your spouse is at EXTREAM risk, and a woman with AIDS has a 50% chance of infecting her newborn child...) And technically, people who sleep around using a condom with an antimicrobial reduce their chances of infection by 99% or so (Don't quote me on that).

So, why is it that South Africa is so messed up? The people there have access to what I do information wise...

It's disturbing really.

Oh... And I have an appointment to see my advisor so I can get registered... Yea!