A Long Rant on HIV

On HIV:

This week is immunology week in our course. (Immunology is the study of how the body’s innate defences against infection and injury can go wrong.) This includes HIV, which is an infection of immune cells rendering them impotent and allowing other infections, which normally have no foothold in the body, to take over; it is usually eventually fatal. One of the figures which particularly struck me was the worldwide prevalence of HIV: 1 in every 150 people worldwide have HIV. This is amazing. That’s a lot of people who have it.

How often do people think about HIV, and how they might reduce its incidence, or the suffering of the people who have it? For a disease which is so insidiously prevalent worldwide, why is it that there is almost no focus on it in the media? A few people die of SARS, over a few months, and it’s an epidemic. Many more people die from AIDS-related disease every year and there’s little to no mention of it. Perhaps one of the reasons is because a majority of infected people live in Africa, and who cares about such an overpopulated, underdeveloped, poor, politically unimportant, war-torn, dirty, primitive area anyway? An estimated 35% of people in southern Africa are infected with HIV. I bet if the numbers were that high in America or Australia we’d be hearing about it at least once a week on the news.

Another reason would probably be related to the primary methods of transmission of the HIV. Everyone knows homosexual men and intravenous drug users are the most at risk, right? (In fact, in Australia, where there are needle exchange programs and safe injecting rooms, the highest risk is in homosexual men, whereas in the US where such programs don’t exist, the intravenous drug users make up a far higher proportion of those who contract HIV, and numbers of people infected with HIV are some four times higher.) This must be a punishment from higher powers, right? Maybe God’s punishing the gays! And the druggies! Serves them right!

This viewpoint *really really* pisses me off. Firstly if you have this view of HIV then you should logically apply that view to diseases like polio, which paralyses kids. Yeah, those kids! They need some discipline! That’s what polio’s for! Or smallpox, which almost wiped out the American Indians. Well, that’s natural selection, right? The best survives? …Secondly, no one has the authority to speak for God. Who knows why God does things? We can guess and we might even get it right sometimes, but if you’re not God, don’t speak for him. People like that give God a bad name.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to HIV; HIV was just the medium by which I started thinking about all this. What about vaccine-preventable diseases? (That was in another lecture I had this week.) The poor regions, Africa and South-East Asia, have the highest rates of vaccine-preventable infant deaths. Things like diptheria, tetanus- diseases we in Australia get vaccinated for almost automatically from birth. Cheap vaccines which can potentially prevent life-long illness, deformity and death are not given. Why? And why does no one in normal life seem to care? I’m not even saying I’m special in this respect; I know myself, and I know that in a week or two after I’ve written this, I’ll go back to not caring about any of it. Why?

This leads me onto a related topic. I often wonder whether, in training to be a doctor, I’m doing the best with my life I can. As a Christian, I believe the most important thing is to bring people to know God. An extremely basic summation of Christianity (which leaves out quite a lot of necessary detail; don’t anyone assume this is all there is to it, because that’s not what I mean to portray) is, believe in God or go to hell. Literally. So any Christian who cares in any way at all about anyone else is practically compelled to warn them about the consequences of not believing.

Where is the space in this for doctoring? For healing people’s bodies, when they’ll be going to hell anyway? What is the point, in the long run? Who cares about those infected with HIV? They can still become Christians! And then they’ll die, but it won’t matter because they won’t be in hell! A subtle variation on this argument: what’s so bad about slavery? They had slaves back in Jesus’ day, and some of them even became Christians. Paul even told them to obey their masters. So why did a few Christians in the 1800s take such offence at the whole practice of slavery and start up an anti-slavery movement?

I’m glad that someone reminded me of the two greatest commandments at this point. They are: “love God” and “love your neighbour”. If you love someone, you want what’s best for them. This includes telling them about hell, because I think most people would agree that hell is probably a long way from being the best for anyone. But it also, I think, includes quality of life. If you love someone, you will want a higher quality of life for them. And that’s the reason why slavery was abolished (in quite a lot of places, but not all; slavery still exists and anyone who denies that has their head in the sand), and that’s the reason why we should remember and try to care for HIV infected people.

And that’s why I will continue to train in doctoring. Because even though I may not be primarily involved in telling people about God and hell and what the difference is, I will still be trying to improve the quality of some people’s lives, by prolongation or by relief of pain and disease, and that’s all part of loving my neighbour.

By Esta the med student
got any problems or corrections? send an email here

deaded at 4:35 pm