I am moved. Not by car or subway, or even through time and space by sophisticated cell-phone technology. I am moved by news reports (some with pictures of eternity-bound adults and babies) about the massive human toll from AIDS around the world. Twenty-two million people have died from AIDS and another 22 million have the HIV virus that gives rise to it.
Nobel Prize winner Eli Weisel, a Holocaust survivor and author, cautions against comparing tragedies by cause or body count. Yet there’s no denying the number of AIDS-related deaths is staggering by any measure.
Here’s how Donald M. Berwick, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare, sized up the pandemic in a Washington Post commentary last week: “Three million humans died of AIDS in the year 2000, 2.4 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. That is a Holocaust every two years; the entire population of Oregon, Iowa, Connecticut or Ireland dead last year, and next year, and next.”
AIDS, which is being fought with expensive triple-cocktails, government funding and goodwill from pharmaceutical firms, is everywhere. Africa is particularly hard hit. Western industrial nations are not spared. A good friend recently told me he had become HIV positive. You probably also know (knew) somebody.
So what’s my point?
Not long ago I was e-mailed a photo of a radiation protection device on a mobile phone. It looked like a condom. Huh? I was mildly amused, already harboring doubts about the dubious health benefit of radiation shields. The juxtaposition of a mobile phone and a condom, though? How bizarre!
Or is it?
In coming years, mobile-phone growth likely will be greatest in emerging markets with too little telecom infrastructure and too much AIDS. Youth will fuel demand. For hormone-crazy teenagers and young adults-on the move and on the make-mobile phones will be a staple of social life. That’s not speculation. It’s a given. Look around.
Why not market mobile phones and condoms together, not just in Africa but in other regions where AIDS is devouring populations. The economics and demographics work. I hear you snickering. But I’m dead serious. Perhaps my mind has become polluted from all those Internet cross-marketing arrangements out there.
A United Nations conference last week on AIDS-how to fight it-recommends more cooperation between public and private sectors, the Associated Press reported.
As important and time sensitive as treatment is, prevention is the key in the long run.
