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  • Title: We are all people living with AIDS: myths and realities of AIDS in Brazil.
    Author: Daniel H.
    Journal: Int J Health Serv; 1991; 21(3):539-51. PubMed ID: 1917212.
    Abstract:
    Although AIDS was expected in Brazil, no serious efforts were undertaken to prevent AIDS from taking root. Irresponsible press and media coverage highlighted the spread of AIDS within the gay community of the United States, creating an aura of immunity in Brazil to what was characterized as a "foreign" disorder. When AIDS did surface in 1983, the official response was to adopt an abstract, inappropriate, and ideological "Western" model, in which only stigmatized "others" and "minorities" were at risk of HIV infection. Brazilian health authorities subsequently downplayed the significance of the sale of contaminated blood in HIV transmission, and likewise ignored the rising rates of AIDS among Brazil's one unarguable majority group: the poor. An analysis of efforts to force the "facts" of AIDS to fit a false model's predictions leads to a clearer definition of the broader context of the Brazilian epidemic: we all are people living with AIDS, precisely because we live in this age of AIDS; it is sheer folly to discriminate against persons infected by HIV and to obstruct their participation in efforts to curtail the epidemic's spread; and the necessary response to AIDS is solidarity, not because it is poetic, but because no other response will suffice. Despite general public and administrative awareness of AIDS since 1982, virtually nothing has been done by the Brazilian government to check its epidemic spread in Brazil. Press reports, especially in the early days of AIDS, were a mixture of reports covering the U.S. experience with AIDS and yellow journalism designed to fuel public debate, controversy, and spending on medial consumption. This mixed image of the epidemic helped portray AIDS as an affliction to others, enigmatic and somewhat exotic. Though AIDS was expected to arrive in Brazil, complacent, unconcerned officials responded in a lackadaisical manner through the veil of an abstract, inappropriate, and ideological Western-oriented model. Failing to recognize the imminently board spectrum of sexual orientation prevalent in Brazil, and in contrast to that of U.S. society, Brazilian officials tried to classify Brazilians into the easy, accepted categories of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual as assumed in North American and Europe. Blood supplies were eventually tainted out of this failure to take constructive action, with the resultant mass infection of segments of the Brazilian population. This author is angry with Brazilian public and private attitudes at the lowest and highest levels of administration, and indicts the bureaucratic system created by his society. Complacency, ignorance, and social discrimination have resulted in countless deaths, and continue to incur great economic costs and mortality. He calls upon society to re-examine what living with AIDS is all about, how it affects society as a whole, and recognize the crucial need to fight the war on AIDS with solidarity as a united, committed whole. AIDS is not a problem afflicting limited minority groups; it threatens major economic breakdown, especially in 3rd World countries, in the absence of universal cooperation between those infected, and those who would otherwise consider themselves immune.
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