HIV perceptions

Justen, is an innovative Zimbabwyan artist, who worked on doing the "balance bird", it is the symbol of Zimbabwe. We will try to sell it in US and Sweden to fund the Zimbabwe Red Cross and Zimbabwe AIDS Prevention Project (ZAPP) to support their services to HIV patients. Today, March 23rd, 2007, 1US$=250Zim$ (official rate), but people talk about unofficial market (1US$ = 6,500 - 10,000 Zim$).

It is quite interesting/sad to see how politics influence people's perceptions about different issues. In terms of HIV/AIDS, Pieter Fourier wrote in his book "The political management of HIV and AIDS in South Africa", He talked how people used to call AIDS as the "Afrikaans Invention to Discourage Aids", because it showed among two homosexuals in Cape Town in the 80's. Another article, by Marks Chabedi, talked about AIDS as the "American Invention to Discourage Sex" (State Power, Violence, Crime and Everyday Life: a Case Study of Soweto in Post-Apartheid South Africa).

>From prof. Hans Rosling blogg http://roslingsblogger.blogspot.com/2006/11/less-sex-more-condomes-stop-to-hiv.html Less sex & more condomes = stop to HIV Yesterday UNAIDS declared: " the global AIDS epidemic continuous to grow... an estimated 40 millions are living with HIV... the number with HIV has increased from 37 millions in 2004. www.unaids.org But on the AIDS day in 2004 the message from UNAIDS was that "over 41 million people are living with HIV/AIDS" http://www.un.org/events/aids/2004/ Are UNAIDS lying? No, it is led by honest and good scientists, so how come? If you dig further into the data you find that the uncertainty range of UNAIDS estimates are wide: - somewhere between 32 to 44 millions lived with HIV in 2004 and today somewhere between 34 to 47 millions. So the true number may be slowly falling. A reasonable conclusion is that the number of HIV infected in the world remains the same over the last years. But telling that may put funding for much n...