theodore dalrymple on an honest and funny look at the
self-righteous AIDS industry |
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From the very moment it was first recognised, the AIDS epidemic produced a fluttering in many dovecotes. Puritans saw it as God's vengeance upon the wicked; others claimed, no more plausibly, that the disease organism was not prejudiced and that everyone was equally at risk.
Elizabeth Pisani is a talented woman who speaks both Chinese and Indonesian. She worked first as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and then studied epidemiology at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. For the last 10 years or so she has worked on AIDS surveillance in Africa, Indonesia, East Timor and other Asian countries. This has necessitated a detailed, and seemingly enthusiastic, study of the sex lives of prostitutes, transsexuals, drug addicts and other marginals of many cities. The Wisdom of Whores is a summary of her
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findings and conclusions, which she laces with anecdotes.
She thinks that two great forces have distorted international attempts to control the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Asia: political correctness and religious fundamentalism. Political correctness has inhibited unequivocal official recognition that AIDS is spread by certain sexual practices and the injection of drugs, which means that efforts at prevention are often directed at people who are not at risk in the first place, while neglecting those who are. Religious fundamentalism has prevented or obstructed practical solutions, such as the distribution of condoms, in favour of utopian goals such as sexual abstinence.
In her condemnation of the self-righteous, she can sometimes sound self-righteous herself. But her book is very honest, and often funny, about the self-seeking world of what she calls the AIDS industry. According to the well-funded international AIDS bureaucracy, a project is successful if it has spent all the money allocated to it. Whether the project does any good, either
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