Research Of An International Policy Issue Example

Research Of An International Policy Issue Example Research Of An International Policy Issue â€" Essay Example > IntroductionHIV is one source of crisis and suffering among many that desperately call for attention. Even in a middle income community in Europe or the United States where people expect to live to old age and cure what diseases they may contract, HIV battles for center stage with other life-threatening diseases. Social movements have been organized to combat patterns of discrimination and stigma associated with the disease and to convince national policy makers and health care providers of the hazard and the enormity of the suffering caused by HIV infection. Even in communities where treatment is insured and comfortable lifestyles affordable, debates concerning the distribution of funds for research and treatment, and the usefulness of early testing and diagnosis and its impact on the quality of daily life, have constituted an ongoing discussion (Angell, 1997). In the poorer countries of the world as indeed in poor areas of the United States, the dilemmas of making choices as to the allocation of scarce resources is more extreme. Should HIV take priority over other infectious diseases? Where should these resources come from and who should receive them? If prevention is the only feasible strategy, should funding be devoted to the prevention of HIV alone or to general public health and community health education efforts? Anthropologists and public health researchers and policy makers have to make hard choices. They have to balance their convictions against the requirements of the situation. Poverty and social disruption force us to evaluate moral issues within a different frame. Questions which appear to lead to one answer in the United States may generate contrasting responses in other situations. Consider simply whether to recommend that a young mother with possible symptoms should be encouraged to seek an HIV test. The Joint United Nation’s Program on HIV/AIDS’ (UNAIDS) charts the AIDS epidemic internationally. It documents its scale and sternness in Africa and the way in which that continent’s population has excessively borne its brunt. on the whole, by the end of the year 1999 it was estimated that 24.5 million people were living with HIV/AIDS on the African continent (UNAIDS, 2000). The prototype of difficulty varies, with those countries in eastern and southern Africa most affected (UNAIDS, 1998. 1 nonetheless, the overall rate of adult occurrence for the continent, at an estimated 8 per cent, is far, far higher than that of any other region of the globe, the next closest being the Caribbean at 1.96 per cent (UNAIDS, 1998). That AIDS has gained so tight a grip on a number of African countries is partially a result of their poverty, as symbolized by deficiencies in nutrition, hazards of living, and lack of access to medical care. In several cases, national indebtedness as well as regimes of structural adjustment has worsened difficulties of securing livelihoods and restricted access to health services, further adding to br oad risk ecology in respect of AIDS. The very nature of the (indistinct) development they have experienced has figured in the spread and entrenchment of HIV/AIDS in these countries. Through its impact on output and the costs it involves, the epidemic is operating sequentially to aggravate further developmental progress, so much so that it has been belatedly recognized by international institutions to be the leading development concern for the present and predictable future. In the Kilimanjaro area of Tanzania, AIDS has been professed by many as being bound up with a ‘gradually emerging cultural crisisâ€"a crisis rooted in transformations that began before the turn of the century’ (Jordan, Theresa, 1985). Ideas concerning sex and workâ€"reproduction as well as productionâ€"have been created in concurrence with changing opportunities and new discourses, chiefly in the lives of youth, who, in seizing upon them and apparently discarding behaviors as well as practices which were pr eviously valued, have been both vilified and placed in positions of greater vulnerability in respect of AIDS. Their elders in turn have seen youths’ vulnerability to HIV as justification of their own anxiety concerning the obvious abandonment of those former customs which had offered the social cement for the community’s very survival. In this sense, AIDS has produced a similar unease with changing norms of sexual behaviourâ€" although attached to different specific practicesâ€"as took place in the North.