July 07, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:You may disagree with Den
You may disagree with Den Beste when he says that anti-HIV drugs aren't the answer in Africa. But this is why you can't just dismiss him as mean and hard-hearted.
In the San Francisco gay community, 13% of newly identified cases of HIV are resistant to two or more classes of drugs -- up from 6% five years ago.
Unless the strains are significantly less infectious or deadly than the non-resistant strains, they'll spread more quickly -- their fitness advantage will give them a heavy head start. That means that the change will be geometric, not arithmetic; in other words, it won't be 20% of cases in 5 years; it could be 30% or more.
Drug resistance is an enormous problem. It requires careful medical management -- the kind Africa doesn't have and can't afford, no matter how much money we ship them. We can't give them an entire modern medical infrastructure overnight.
One of the moral questions we have to face -- and answer -- is whether we are morally justified in withholding drugs from African nations without the infrastructure to police their administration in order to prevent drug-resistant strains from developing and coming here.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 7, 2002 08:43 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links