 "Photo: Jason Sweeten")
Students from UT's Face AIDS organization aimed to help correct some of the fallacies and myths surrounding AIDS through a panel Tuesday at the University Teaching Center.
They were joined by three UT professors who each focused their talks on HIV and AIDS issues in Africa and globally.
Face AIDS is a student organization that strives to inspire students to help fight AIDS in Africa, said sociology junior Lisa Newhouse, a member of the group.
"With regards to Africa, a part of finding out the history is figuring out who should be speaking," said assistant history professor James Wilson Jr. "We rarely hear from the Africans themselves. We rarely hear from the women and the orphans. We hear from the missionaries and the medical experts."
Wilson also emphasized the need to understand how the colonization of Africa has affected the lack of hospitals and education present there today.
"I have a simple goal: to get people to understand the disease and how it spreads among a population," said UT biology lecturer Barbara Moore.
The oldest record containing a physical, HIV-positive sample dates back to 1959 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she said.
"There are clinical reports in European countries and in the U.S. going back to the late '50s and '60s that look a lot like what we call AIDS in the 21st century," Moore said.
Because HIV can be transmitted sexually, people in the health profession have the know-how to stop the spread of the disease, but changing behavior is harder, she said.
Joshua Busby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, highlighted the political aspects of HIV and AIDS and critiqued individual governments in African countries on their responsiveness to the disease.
The U.S. is the single greatest contributor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, giving a third of the fund's resources, Busby said.
"I'm trying to emphasize that some countries are doing more than others," Busby said. "Uganda and Kenya have been doing more. Uganda has had policies dating back to the '90s. Until recently, South Africa was pretty bad. They had a president who denied that HIV caused AIDS, which was totally ludicrous. South Africa has more than 5 million [with AIDS] and was just recently overtaken in numbers by India."
No single strategy works completely, but a combination of prevention and education measures works best, he said. He cited Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni's ABC campaign, which encourages "abstinence, be faithful and condoms" as an example.
"There's two sides to the issue: prevention and treatment," Busby said. "The focus of donors has recently been focused on treatment, but as long as people are getting infected, the number of people who need to be on these drugs will grow and grow and grow. It gets to be quite expensive, so prevention strategies need to work, but behavioral change is hard."
There are opportunities to deal with the problem, and it's a moral obligation to try and help others, he said.
"We hope that [students] will also realize that they can make a difference," Newhouse said. "Knowledge is power, and what they learn here could mobilize them and potentially change the world. We want to encourage people to become more active and more involved in HIV prevention."
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