United Press International - July 16, 2002
Lou Marano

HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus, the pathogen that causes the deadly acquired immune deficiency syndrome. An AIDS epidemic is devastating much of sub-Saharan Africa.

FRC President Ken Connor said, "I don't want to sound like Oscar the Grouch, but I think it's a bad idea. AIDS is first and foremost a sexually transmitted disease," he said, that results from such high-risk behavior as homosexual sex and promiscuous heterosexual sex, as well as intravenous drug use.

Connor said that if United Nations estimates are correct, 65 million people will be infected with HIV by 2020.

"'Sesame Street' says that it wants to teach compassion, and it wants to provoke a discussion about the disease. It also says of its Muppet character that she'll be healthy and vibrant." But, he said, Sesame Workshop -- the organization that produces the show -- is effectively "putting a politically correct smiley face on a deadly disease," because most children in South Africa who are infected with HIV through their mothers at birth die of AIDS by the age of 6.

The program's target audience is children 3 to 7 years of age.

"The subject, in my judgment, is inappropriate," Connor told United Press International. "Teaching tolerance and compassion is admirable, but a more age-appropriate model should be found."

He said the Muppet character would present "a truncated view" of the devastating effect AIDS is having in South Africa. "Why a sexually transmitted disease?" Connor asked. "Would we have Herbie the Herpes Monster? Claudia Chlamydia? Just think about it. It doesn't make sense for this age group, for heaven's sakes." Konnie McCaffree, professor of sexuality education at Widener University near Philadelphia, has lived in "black South Africa," working with family planning educators.

"I think it's a wonderful idea," she said of the new character. She was "disturbed" to learn that it won't also happen in the United States "because having HIV is not necessarily a death sentence for people here. It certainly can be in South Africa," she said, where people don't have the medications available here.

It is as valuable a skill for children to learn to deal with people who have a virus as it is for them to deal with anybody with a "difference," however perceived, the professor told UPI. "South Africa definitely needs to deal with the issue of HIV in their population." People there "are not getting a whole lot of support from the higher-ups in the government," McCaffree said. "A couple of ministry people are actually denying that HIV is an issue."

Peter Mokaba, a prominent member of parliament from the African National Congress, has written that HIV does not exist, that people are not dying of AIDS, and that the anti-retroviral drugs used against the disease are so poisonous, "they could lead to genocide."

After actor Will Lee -- who played kindly shopkeeper Mr. Hooper on "Sesame Street" -- died in 1982, his death was worked into an episode in which the grown-ups helped Big Bird understand that his friend would not return. McCaffree was asked if she could picture the Muppet contracting full-blown AIDS, getting sick and passing on.

"Well, I certainly see that that's a possibility down the line. I don't think it's necessarily something that people have to deal with all the time," she replied.

McCaffree referred to Nkosi Johnson, the South African boy whose plight dramatized the epidemic. Nkosi died at age 12 on June 1, 2001, after a desperate final battle with AIDS. He was born HIV-positive in Johannesburg on Feb. 4, 1989, according to the BBC, and given just nine months to live. He became a public figure in 1997 after a group of parents opposed his admission to school because of his HIV status.

The day after Nkosi died, Britain's Guardian newspaper recounted that the boy had "humiliated and scolded (South African) President Thabo Mbeki to his face for his government's refusal to supply pregnant women with the drugs that could save their babies from HIV."

Mbeki had met widespread criticism for questioning the link between HIV and AIDS and for refusing wide access to anti-retroviral drugs, saying they are costly and toxic. His government even resisted the use of Nevirapine, a relatively cheap drug found to be effective in reducing the transmission of HIV from mothers to babies. An ANC document charged that Nkosi had been killed by the anti-retroviral drugs his white foster mother had forced him to consume.

The Guardian also reported that just before he died, Nkosi was again at the center of a racially charged turmoil provoked by the disease that killed him.

"Hilda Khoza, a reflexologist, claimed that Nkosi was fit to go to school and that from television pictures she had diagnosed him as merely suffering from constipation," the paper said. His distraught foster mother, Gail Johnson, then did what she had long resisted: She allowed press photographers to take pictures of Nkosi's frail, wasted body. A few hours later he was dead.

In April 2002, Mbeki's Cabinet said it would act on the "premise" that HIV causes AIDS and reversed the ban on the treatment of rape victims in state hospitals with anti-retroviral drugs, the BBC reported. The government also announced plans to offer universal access to those drugs next year in an effort to prevent women from infecting their babies during childbirth.

McCaffree said the issue must be viewed through a South African lens. With reference to the appropriateness of an HIV-positive Muppet, she said that not a day goes by when a black South African child doesn't have to deal with death in some way. "People are always dying," she said, if not from AIDS then from violence or malaria or typhoid fever.

It's also important to remember that Muppets "cross the race barrier," McCafree said. "Muppets don't have a race to them."

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