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In 2001, an AIDS infected person in Cuba was dying every 3 days. In South Africa, an AIDS infected person was dying every 2 minutes. South Africa has a population of 44 million, Cuba has a population of 12 million. South Africa's' population is almost 4 times greater, yet their fatality rate from AIDS is exactly 3000 times greater than Cubas. So, South Africa has FOUR times the population of Cuba, but THREE-THOUSAND times the amount of AIDS-fatalities as Cuba. For the year 2001, 120 AIDS-infected people died in Cuba, 360,000 AIDS-infected people died in South Africa. This comparison by no means invalidates the relation between Cuba and South Africa.
On January 1st, 2001 at 4 a.m. South African time, 120 people had already died of AIDS, only four hours into the new year. It would take Cuba all 365 days of that year to come up with 120 fatalities from AIDS, the numbers are staggering.
America is said to be the richest country in the world, and the state of Connecticut has the highest per capita income of the entire nation. For the year 2001, 5,932 people died from AIDS in Connecticut, the richest state in America. Connecticut has 3.4 million residents, it is quarter the size of Cuba, but Connecticut has exactly 50 times the AIDS-fatality rate that Cuba has.
So, in a quick comparison, the poorest parts of Africa have an AIDS death toll which is THREE-THOUSAND times greater than Cuba. The richest part of America has an AIDS death toll which is FIFTY times greater than Cuba. Cuba is a pioneer when it comes to AIDS, with only 120 people dying of AIDS just three years ago, it's safe to say that probably only 60 or 70 people will die of AIDS this year in Cuba. Education for AIDS is the wrong way to go, Elimination of AIDS is the correct way to go. With education, there is an endless supply of people that you must educate, as more people are being born day after day. Even with education, a person can still be raped and educated people get hooked on drugs also and end up using dirty needles, education is the wrong way to go for AIDS. If all you had to do was sit people down for a few hours, have them watch an informative video and pass out a few pieces of educational papers, AIDS would have been wiped out years back.
Once again, Cuba has the cure, the cure being the remedy, the remedy being the solution, and as we have seen by those numbers, Cuba has the solution. The cure does NOT have to come in a pill, vaccination, or needle form. As long as people keep thinking the cure for AIDS will be something that you can get over the counter or from your doctor, thousands more will keep dying in Africa. It's silly what's going on, there are people working around the clock in labs all over America and the rest of the world, trying to develop vaccinations and cures for AIDS, and the tiny island of Cuba known for poverty which is just miles off the Florida coast is light years ahead of America and Africa when it comes to battling AIDS.
Bono has the best intentions in the world, I think he's the best entertainer to ever walk the planet, but I just don't think he's going about the fight of AIDS in the correct way. Like I said, if you think education is the way to fight AIDS, you will have to educate the kids that are born tomorrow, the next year, and 10 years after that. AIDS education is a never-ending cycle, and Bono better be prepared to live another million years to keep educating every child being born in Sub-Sahara Africa. If you think vaccinations are the way to go, you have to develop one first, then mass produce it, then you have the fun job of going around Africa poking an estimated billion people in the arm with a needle, but I guess if Bono and Beyonce split up the population of the continent, they only have to vaccinate 500 million people each
And, when they're done vaccinating those estimated 1 billion people in Africa, they then still have to stay there for years to keep vaccinating all the children being born daily.
Bono instead wants to ship $billions dollars of worth of medication to Sub-Sahara Africa, with this medication having the effect of prolonging the lives of people with AIDS. It's a noble thing that Bono is doing, but prolongong the life of an AIDS-infected person has its ramifications. It's only common sense, that the longer a person lives, the more people a person comes into contact with. A person that spends 60 years on this planet will befriend and acquaint themsevles with more people than a child who gets killed riding his bike at the age of 5. The longer a mother lives, the greater the chance that she will have more babies. The longer an AIDS-infected man lives, the greater the chance that he will have intercourse with more people.
So, let's say there is a 20 year-old woman named Sally in South Africa right now, let's say she has AIDS and doctors say she has 5 years to live, so she'll die when she's 25. But, here comes Bono, and out of the goodness of his heart, he's bringing with him money and powerful medication to prolong Sally's life. So, with this medication, she might make it to the age of 35 or maybe even to the age of 45, which is a great improvement over her prior estimate which only gave her 5 years to life. But with those additional 10 or 15 years she has gained, she now has gained 10 or 15 years to have more children, she has gained an additional 10 or 15 years to have intercourse with more people, she has gained an additional 10 or 15 years to spend in a hospital where medical needles might be entering her body, she has gained an additional 10 or 15 years to use drug-needles if she happens to be a drug addict. That is the reality of what is going on in sub-sahara Africa. We're all in agreement that what Bono is doing for Sally is a great thing, but with Sally living longer, odds are and history shows that she is going to have more children, and that is a FACT. I don't care if you go use demographics of Africa or America, your average 40 year old woman has more children than the average 20 year old woman. The longer a woman lives, statistically she will have more children. Now, count up how many "Sally"s there are in sub-Sahara Africa, it's in the hundreds of thousands, and if they're all going to be living an extra 10 or 15 years, get ready for more AIDS-infected babies being born than has ever seen before in Africa. These AIDS-infected babies are being born with no hope, and every year more of them are being born, every year more money is entering Africa to fight AIDS, and then more and more AIDS babies are being born, and the trend will continue just like it has for 20 years now.
AIDS has been upgraded to a 'catastrophe' level in South Africa. According to the best estimates of U.S. experts, one-quarter of the entire South African population will die of AIDS. One fifth of South Africa's adults are already believed to be infected with the HIV virus, which leads to AIDS. Back in the year 2000, President Clinton said that AIDS is a "threat to national security" after seeing the numbers from South Africa, after years of Clinton and America sending $ hundreds of millions to South Africa, Clinton had to come out and admit things were getting much worse, not better. President Bush then became President, he has given $millions to South Africa, and once again, the problem is getting worse. I'm not even taking into account the money and manpower being sent to Africa to fight AIDS from all the other countries in the world, which has also been going on for countless years. As more money is being spent in Africa, year after year we keep seeing the infection rate and the fatality rate get worse. It's the situation which "Sally" keeps perpetuating which is making things so much worse in South Africa.
The BBC reported how hundreds of thousands of AIDS-medication tablets were stolen when they were delivered to Uganda. Once you start dropping off all this medication, you then have to turn around and make sure corrupt druglords and illegal-businessmen don't get their hands on it and control the whole supply, that's just another problem with sending in medication and hoping it makes its way around the entire continent.
If Bono wants to STOP the progression of AIDS in Africa and especially in South Africa where he visits most often, he has to give up on the failed method of the past 20 years. How many more years of the numbers getting worse will have to occur before people realize that it's not working. Between the $billions being sent into Africa, and the $ hundreds of millions that U2 has in the bank, Bono needs to have some luxurious hospitals/hotels built just for AIDS-infected residents, and once these residents enter these hotels, they are forced to stay within those walls forever. They can allow to have meetings with family/friends, but they should not be allowed to venture outside the walls of those hospitals/hotels. Of course it's a violation of a person's civil rights to keep them locked inside such a hospital/hotel and not leave them the opportunity to walk around society, but it's more of a violation of civil rights to keep allowing babies be born with Hiv/Aids and to know these babies have no hope. US Experts under the Clinton administration said that a quarter of South Africans now have AIDS, they said this in 2000 after decades of funding and they said the situation is getting worse. At this rate, you won't have to worry about people's civil rights in South Africa as there won't be any people left with current stats showing how an AIDS-infected person is dying every 2 minutes in South Africa.
If an AIDS baby is born tomorrow, all this money on AIDS-education won't do a thing for that baby. If you educate a 15 year old girl on AIDS in South Africa and she is raped on the way home from her AIDS-awareness class by an AIDS-infected man, her education won't do her much good. Education is the wrong way to go. Vaccination is the other wrong way to go, Cuba had the lowest rate of AIDS-deaths in the year 2001, Cuba doesn't have a vaccination for AIDS, and Cuba will never need a vaccination for AIDS.
You can drive by any Merck, Pfizer, or other major drug company building tomorrow, and you'll see Mercedes and BMW cars parked outside, and inside you'll see mostly white people searching for a cure, and they're getting paid lots of money from big government funds and contributions. They've been getting $ hundreds of millions for years from governments and contributors, they have no cure yet, but they have some fancy cars in the parking lot. After years of not arriving at a cure, they're given more money, and they still fail to find a cure, and that failure then leads to these whites in the drug companies getting more and more money to find the cure, and that trend is also continuing. If you're John Doe working at these companies in the lab all day, your constant inability to find the cure for AIDS means you have a job tomorrow, and if you can't find the cure tomorrow, there's always the day after that. Once your John Doe finds the cure, the company he works for could make massive profits and money, but unless John Doe has lots of shares of that company, he won't make a thing, he'll be out of a job since the government will no longer be contributing research money. I know that if I was John Doe, I would be accepting the money and just sitting in the break room all day watching TV. It's an outrage that the white 'scientists' are making $millions off this AIDS situation, instead of 100% of the money going to exact places affected by AIDS the most.
If all world governments cut off all contributions to 'scientific' research money, and instead used this money to build luxurious hospitals/hotels in Africa, you would then and ONLY then see the AIDS situation in Africa get better. If all the poor AIDS-infected people living in shacks in Africa right now were allowed to live in 5-star hotels with the best of food, entertainment, with the one stipulation that they must remain in these single-gender hospital/hotel settings around the clock, within 9 months no AIDS-infected baby would ever be born again in Africa. What a human-rights victory that would be, the poor AIDS-infected people are taken out of the shacks and streets and put up in the best of luxury where they get the best of food and medical care. But the biggest human-rights victory would be that within 9 months of the construction of these luxurious hospitals/hotels no AIDS-infected baby is ever born again. And Eureka, you have solved the problem. You also no longer need AIDS-education, since all babies being born are born without AIDS and they will not be allowed to get AIDS since these clean babies will not be living in the hospital/hotel settings. You then won't need a vaccination either, since there is no AIDS to vaccinate against. And we know that the above scenario is 100% possible, since Cuba has accomplished it. The only reason why these hospital/hotel settings can't be built in Africa is because all the current AIDS funds are being used to build drug research buildings in the rest of the world. The white scientists across Europe and America are making $millions, Merck even has locations in Macedonia and Cyprus, while the problem of AIDS has become a catastrophe in Africa.
Instead of Bono saying that "people are standing around with buckets of water", he should be saying that people are standing around putting all their effort into trying to discover one big magical bucket of water, when a big magical bucket isn't necessary. A cure of a medicine form isn't necessary to cure AIDS, but the drug companies won't admit it. Between January 1, 1991 and December 31, 2002 the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association and its members gave $57.9 million in political contributions. The data show that there has been a steady increase in adult AIDS mortality in South Africa during the 1990s. The mortality of young, adult women has increased rapidly in the last few years with the mortality rate in the 25-29 year age range in 1999/ 2000 being some 3.5 times higher than in 1985. As more money is being spent, more people are becoming infected, and more people are dying, and with the $billions that Bush is promising to give to Africa, expect fatalities to double by the year 2010.
. Anyone who has taken any type of statistical analysis class knows that just because two factors are increasing doesn't necessarily mean that there is any correlation between the two. Example: Fact 1 - Sex on television is increasing. Fact 2 - The number of stray cats and dogs are increasing. Using your logic: All the sex on tv is making dogs and cats horney and increasing the number of offspring they are having. Example 2: Obesity in children is on the rise. The number of SUVs on the road is on the rise. Conclusion - SUVs are making kids fat. Obviously these factors have nothing to do with one another. 
. VIVA CUBA 
