Chicago Tribune - February 10, 2003
Dennis Byrne*

Torn by millions of deaths from pandemic, famine, poverty and civil war, Africa could be shaping up to be the globe's most devastating disaster since the Black Plague. Thank God for people like Microsoft's Bill Gates, whose foundation is giving $200 million to leverage research that could break the grip that AIDS, malaria, dengue, West Niles virus and other diseases have on Africa. Think of it, Gates said, maybe science can genetically modify mosquitoes that can no longer transmit some of those diseases.

Good luck, Bill. You're talking about genetically changing an entire continent's mosquitoes, when some countries there have refused to accept emergency famine shipments because they contain genetically modified food.

Last year, the World Health Organization estimated that nearly 14 million people, including 2.3 million children under 5 years old, were in danger of starvation. But more than a million tons of grain, including half from the U.S., were refused because they were "poisoned" by genetic engineering. No scientific evidence confirms that genetically modified foods are a danger. Still, African farmers feared that the GM foods could "contaminate" their "pristine" crops, and they would lose their biggest markets for their products--Europe.

Europe, again. It's because crazies in Europe have successfully imposed bans on genetically altered crops that tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people in Africa have starved. Too harsh? Well, maybe it is something to remember the next time that Europe--especially France and Germany--attack the United States for its "cowboy" foreign policies, or for not doing "enough" to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa.

It almost has become a pastime, even for some chatterers here. One American columnist said Bush could "barely trouble" himself with the African AIDS epidemic, slavery in Sudan and thuggery of assorted dictators and civil wars. Then when Bush canceled a planned January trip to Africa, he was skewered for his "insensitivity" to those dying of AIDS. Another called Bush and America racist.

Then when Bush announced an unprecedented $15 billion global program to fight HIV and AIDS, especially in Africa, he received faint praise. Among the criticisms: It's not going to the right bureaucracy. More typical was the suggestion that he was doing it for political advantage, to show he was no captive of conservative hard-liners. How do we know his intentions were cynical? Because--and here comes the unspoken universal in this syllogism--no conservative can possibly care about people or show compassion.

I ran across an astonishing assertion that "moral conservatives" refused to treat AIDS as other diseases because they saw HIV transmission as a "product of reckless behavior." In fact, social conservatives fought for years to have AIDS treated precisely as other public health problems. The political left, including many in public health agencies, shamefully insisted that it not be treated as other diseases. "Contact tracing" was a proven method for combating other communicable diseases, but it was anathema in liberal texts in the case of HIV, not for well-founded scientific reasons, because it offended sensitivities about "privacy."

When Illinois passed a sensible law requiring a premarital HIV test to protect unsuspecting spouses, it was angrily repealed because, in part, it was "forcing" people to be married in other states. Social conservatives such as former Illinois state representatives Penny Pullen and Cal Skinner Jr., were among the first to warn that the AIDS epidemic would spread to African-American women and urged strong measures to halt the spread of HIV in prison by rape. They were ridiculed as ideological troglodytes.

Still, it continues. In all the discussions about how to spend the Bush AIDS money, the only time that "sexual abstinence" is mentioned is derisively. Despite irrefutable evidence and logic that HIV will not be transmitted sexually in the absence of sexual activity, the very suggestion that abstinence should be a major part of AIDS education programs remains as repugnant as ever. As far as I'm concerned, they should ship in condoms by air, land and sea, until everyone in Africa is ankle deep in them. But it's finally time for "social liberals" to stop putting people's lives at risk for the political advantage of trashing people's motives.

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*Dennis Byrne is a Chicago-area writer and public affairs consultant

E-mail: dbyrne@interaccess.com

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