Health
It's Offical AIDS Now Declared and Emergency
Leaders urged to take issue seriously
At last, it is official. HIV/AIDS, the catastrophic disease that is the scourge of Africa and Asia and which has accounted for more than a few Americans and Europeans, has been given a regional rubber stamp as being an emergency.
A meeting of regional officials in Port Vila, Vanuatu, in October, was the first to trumpet the disease as being one that looms over the Pacific Islands as a peril of the first order for them.
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In 1996, a United Nations report predicted that the sheer small size of the islands and their population made them likely to be overwhelmed in a manner even more ghastly than in now depopulating African AIDS-stricken countries. But Pacific Island governments attitudes to the disease have been muted and some of the national campaigns against the disease less than half-hearted or just ineffective flops.
At a regional level, the threat has been ignored, even by regional meetings of health ministers, until the New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, raised it at the annual Pacific Islands Forum summit held in August at Nauru. HIV/AIDS made a bow of sorts at the Sixth Consultative meeting of sub-regional organisations held at Port Vila, attended by representatives from a number of important Asian as well as Pacific regional agencies. The Forum Secretary-General, Noel Levi admitted that while Asia long ago accepted how badly it was hit by the disease, the potential impact in the Pacific was only just being recognised. "Cultural taboos make frank discussions of the transmission mechanisms of this disease difficult," he said.
Levi urged Pacific Island governments to deal with the disease in the political arena by taking the matter more seriously.
Vanuatu's Prime Minister, Edward Natapei, noted that Papua New Guinea and Fiji were experiencing rapid growth in HIV rates. But other countries, not officially reporting HIV/AIDS cases, were are also badly affected. "We need to raise the stakes in the region. We need to recognise that life does bring increases in HIV/AIDS and STI (sexually transmitted infections) cases," Natapei said. "It is the very nature of the Pacific to sweep under the carpet issues that are supposedly taboo and not address them in a practical way."
Backing Levi's call, Natapei urged island governments to give more political attention to "critical issues which otherwise may not be fully discussed". "As decisionmakers, political leaders in the Pacific we need to listen to the needs of the marginalised and the poor and implement policies that will ensure protection of their rights.
"HIV/AIDS is no longer an issue for the western world to address. We in the Pacific must strive towards implementing programmes that have political commitment to address it. HIV/AIDS is a cross-cutting issue and cannot be ignored." Natapei said the Pacific Islands should draw on a readily available wealth of experience in Africa and Asia.
