Bloodborne HIV: Don't Get Stuck!

Every year, more than 1.5 million people are newly infected with HIV, the vast majority of them black Africans, with a lot more women than men being infected. Meanwhile, UNAIDS continues to insist that the virus is spread almost entirely through ‘unsafe’ sexual behavior in African countries, though nowhere else in the world. HIV via unsafe healthcare, they insist, almost never happens in countries with the worst healthcare systems in the world.

The institutional racism and sexism exemplified by UNAIDS, the broader UN, the World Bank, charitable foundations and other parties results in huge levels of transmission of a virus that is difficult to transmit through heterosexual sex; transmission through unsafe healthcare remains completely ignored, even denied, by what has become a massive HIV industry.

These institutionally racist and sexist stances also result in the implication that most of the people infected with HIV are highly ‘promiscuous’, careless, uncaring, stupid, and whatever other negative qualities the media happens to have been fed about HIV positive Africans at any given time.

There is no mainstream media coverage of these instances of institutional racism and sexism, no online campaigns to have UNAIDS abolished, no celebrity photo shoots with publicity obsessed naifs being paraded before an adoring (or despising) public, no newspaper articles, neither tabloid nor broadsheet.

Where are the academic articles by those whose entire time is spent, allegedly, examining and analyzing such phenomena and advising those putting together policies that should go towards reducing the transmission of serious diseases like HIV? Which academics are condemning the institutional racism and sexism that has continued, unabated, since HIV became a lucrative headline-grabbing disease in the late 1980s?

There’s plenty of media coverage of some ex-singer that UNAIDS hoped could belt out a few well rehearsed lines in front of a camera (and a sneering Michel Sidibe). A child actress did a better job of memorizing and spewing out the right lines and buzzwords, with the right facial expressions and body language, so she got some publicity too.

An exhibition that sounded (to some) like it would ‘insult’ black people, even though most of the people taking part in it were black South Africans, was banned because a few people managed to drum up a crowd of ‘insulted’ people who had never seen the exhibition. Though insulted by something they had never seen, they remain uninsulted by the continued treatment of black Africans as sex obsessed disease vectors; protestors scream about ‘objectification’, but fail to recognize it in the flesh.

Ultimately, what Victoria Beckham was saying was no more ridiculous than what UNAIDS and other institutions repeat endlessly. She’s just not very good at UN-speak; her mentors haven’t worked on her hard enough; give it time and she too will be able to trott out the same bullshit as the smirking head of UNAIDS does.

No one was infected with HIV by Beckham’s speech and, unlike the usual UNAIDS blather, it wasn’t even articulate enough to be considered racist or sexist. No black people were injured by an exhibition that never happened at the Barbican. The only ones insulted will be the ones who were told that the event was far too shocking for their poor delicate little selves. The truth, clearly, is far too dangerous for ordinary people to handle. Nice to know that the notion of a ‘protectorate’ has not died out completely.