Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1988. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Newsday - October 14, 1988
Laurie Garrett - Staff Correspondent
In a recent interview with Newsday, Kaunda charged that Africans all too often are being looked upon either as potential recipients of untested drugs and vaccines or as the subject of AIDS research that brings fame to foreign scientists but no relief to suffering African patients. Last year Kaunda revealed that his son, Maguzyo Kaunda, 30, had died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
"I wish that some international regulations could be formulated which would place controls on these matters," Kaunda said. "How could anybody think we should be guinea pigs here? Human beings! I can't understand that. We are all one human race, and for any part of it to be treated as guinea pigs, because of their race or I don't know what, is wrong. I can't understand this at all because to me a human being is a human being, God's child, needing some protection, east, west, north, south, regardless of ideology, regardless of color, regardless of anything artifical."
As of June, Zambia has reported 993 AIDS cases to the World Health Organization, giving the nation a rate of 13.9 cases per 100,000 population (the United States has a rate of 29.2 per 100,000). In the nation's capital, Lusaka, nearly 11 percent of adult blood donors test positive for infection with the AIDS virus, according to the Zambian Ministry of Health.
Speaking in the gardens of the presidential mansion in Lusaka one day last week, Kaunda also denounced the role that foreign reporters have played in the African AIDS epidemic.
Some western press accounts have portrayed Zambia as a nation involved in an AIDS coverup, bent on deceiving the world about the extent of its problem. Kaunda angrily denounced such reports.
"They have projected the Zambian government as a government that doesn't want to talk about AIDS, it hides everything. I don't know where they got that impression. We are fighting AIDS like every other country. It is not something we hide. It is not! It exists! My own son has been lost to AIDS. I didn't hide that. I didn't. And I don't intend to. And this is why we say we don't understand why the western press has projected this image of Zambia hiding AIDS, Zambia hiding this and that. We are an open society."
Dr. Ameristo Njelesani, deputy secretary of the Ministry of Health, echoed some of Kaunda's charges. "Many [western] companies have descended on Zambia to exploit our AIDS situation," he said.
When Zambians recognized the presence of AIDS in their country, many foreign scientists approached the Ministry of Health with proposals for research, he said. At first, Njelesani said, they were welcomed without reservation. But many of the scientists exaggerated the size of Zambia's AIDS epidemic and spread terrible stories about the nation's health crisis, he said.
Although he decries what he says is the exploitation of the African countries on the AIDS issue, Kaunda is outspoken about the need for international cooperation in the war on the disease.
"We should be uniting our forces, weak and strong, coming together, because in the end AIDS knows no boundaries," Kaunda said.
The less developed poor nations of Africa, he said, are bearing the brunt of the epidemic and haven't the resources or expertise to do battle against AIDS without assistance from the United States and Europe.
Kaunda will give the keynote address to the International Meeting on AIDS, to be held in Montreal next June.
[***The following appeared in the City version***Kaunda said he will tell the world's top AIDS researchers that "we should carry out a deliberate campaign, worldwide, to educate people about how AIDS might be controlled by having good behavior towards each other. These are issues, in terms of sex, that should be discussed openly."]
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