First Aid for AIDS
Boston Globe - Editorial Notebook - April 1999

by Renee Loth 


NKAWKAW, Ghana--In the teeming market here, people sell casava root, used shoes, cola nuts, dried fish, and safe sex. The UN Population Fund and the Seventh-day Adventist Church have organized the market's long-distance truckers, female porters, and pushcart vendors into a kind of AIDS brigade, wearing T-shirts that urge "say no to casual sex" and carrying bright blue satchels that contain condoms and informational pamphlets.

Health workers noticed that AIDS was spreading in Ghana along the major truck routes, so it was clear that the drivers needed to be recruited to fight the disease. At the truck dispatcher's office near the Jesus Alone Beauty Salon and the Keep Smiling Bar, 70-year-old Emmanuel Danquah explains what he tells fellow truckers in various ports of call. "I advise them not to mix sex with anybody at all until they are properly married. I tell them AIDS is a killer disease." He says his advanced age helps his message command respect, but he an only hope for acceptance.

AIDS has not attacked Ghana with the ferocity, seen elsewhere in Africa, but with 45 percent of he country's people under age 15 and about to enter their most sexually active years, spreading he word is specially urgent. The official HIV infection rate is 2 percent, a third the regional average, but the real figure is probably higher. Patients at clinics are not routinely tested for HIV unless they are showing symptoms of the disease.

By that time there is little chance for effective intervention. The expensive drug therapies that have prolonged life for so many AIDS patients in he United States are not even discussed. Condoms, bleach, and fidelity are the only weapons.

Education takes whatever form it can. The UN holds workshops for barbers, teaching them not to reuse razor blades. Traditional "wanzum" -the 10- all surgeons who circumcise boys -are told to sterilize their knives. Churches give out condoms as simple as that, and as profound.

 


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