Allison Beers
Introduction
Growth is biased, leaning more favorably to those institutions and countries
with the most money, knowledge, and development. For the purposes of this paper,
a developed country shall be one with the following characteristics: gender equality,
accessible healthcare, and a responsive government with a concern for its people.
These qualities are those that compromise a country’s ability to provide a safe
environment, especially in terms of curbing diseases like HIV/AIDS. Quantifying
these standards is difficult, yet the following measurements will suffice: HIV
prevalence, doctor to patient ratios, and income from medicines. These statistics
provide insight into the effect that HIV/AIDS has on the country’s state of
development, and vice versa. Using South Africa and the United States as examples,
one can examine how governmental and societal response to emergencies changes
as the country’s state of development changes. Because HIV/AIDS created a sense of
emergency within South Africa, it initiated a series of developmental reforms,
simultaneously depleting the resources of the country and making it exponentially
more difficult to implement these reforms. Yet it was the hostile social stigma
associated with HIV/AIDS that prevented the United States government and people
from responding appropriately to the disease and instead actively choosing
ignorance. The United States was just as ineffective in containing HIV/AIDS at the
start of the epidemic as South Africa was in terms of sympathizing with victims and
forming and implementing policy; its only saving characteristic is its high amount of
resources compared to that of South Africa.
Conclusion
It can be said that HIV/AIDS has done more harm than good in terms of the
lives it has taken, yet it catalyzed long-term policies that are on track to improve the
quality of life compared to before HIV/AIDS. If only it did not take a crisis to
necessitate progress in equality (in terms of gender, healthcare, etc.), governments
worldwide would be far more responsible. Even though they are drastically
different, the United States and South Africa handled the same crisis in a nearly
identical way, until the resources and development of the United States
overwhelmed the prevailing sense of prejudice and negligence towards HIV/AIDS.
Extrapolating on this idea, it is most likely that if South Africa had the resources that
the United States did, treating HIV/AIDS would be a much smaller problem, as the
politics of the disease would fade into the background. Dr. James Mason, the
Director of the CDC during the HIV/AIDS crisis, stated, “there are certain areas
which, when the goals of science collide with moral and ethical judgment, science
has to take a time out” (Francis 2012). Although this is a discouraging claim,
especially from the head of one of the most important science departments in the
world, it proved to be true. It is a testament to the prejudice of the society at the
time that saving lives and preventing the spread of disease would be considered
immoral simply because of the nature of the lives being saved. Choice, not
ignorance, was the main factor at play in the HIV/AIDS crisis.