Hell on earth, HIV and Culture

HIV positive, never been poked and not haemophiliac either. Worse of all at only eighteen years of age.

Don’t be quick to say iatrogenic as the patient has never seen a doctor, a western doctor I have to specify. Her only crime is poverty and cultural impositions.

This is the daily life in this beautifully landscaped oasis that we call KZN.
The case gets discussed and shelved in two minutes without even a teardrop or scuffle from the health care professionals involved. The fact that statutory rape was committed with all the evidence available to the doctor, the public prosecutor and the social worker is said in whispers. Closed and shut case with the baby genes available to commit an irresponsible skunk to life imprisonment.

The patient doesn’t see anything wrong either; the 40% incidence is only a number. Half the girls she knows are positive within her age group. To the individual on the table, she’s 100% positive.
To the doctor, I guess she or he is numbed, you don’t carry that much load for years without either committing suicide or insulating oneself from realities of what happens to your patients when they leave the hospital.

The background is HIV incidence of about 5 to 17% nationwide. What if one may ask does happen in the confines of KZN to effect such a dead end incidence. Why does it not affect the boys as much? Why does it not affect Zulus in Gauteng/NW as much? Why does it not affect the other cultures as much? Are we as scientific men and women too afraid to find an easily correctable ill, lest we insult culture and the wrath of the nation?

Could we be found guilty of genocide in the next century? To define 40% as sexually caused would somehow invoke at least three times as much bedtime activity for locals than the average for the rest of the country. To define a medical ward entirely occupied by immune compromised patients as a standard deviation acceptable to the HIV statistics is criminal.

Had the president been seen in the context of what happens here on daily basis at the time of his trial, or should I say had the jury been locals, maybe there could have been no trial after all. Justice is statistical (majority rules) as history has proved time after time. Right and wrong has no weight in this democratic nation. Get 3 hyenas to out vote a lamb as to who should be frying for supper and justice marches on. 

There could be many other contributory causes to our situation here other than us as professionals being toothless to report a 40yrs old fool infecting a 14yrs old child. We could be using the same blade in the ingrained blood letting exercise most of our customers undergo at a herbalist before consulting the west. We could be infecting the young girls at virginity testing. (HIV or STD) We could even have to stop having multiple wives as the parents should lead by example.

If my kid is watching me doing her mother as number five in the queue every day, how do we expect him to respect his girlfriend or girlfriends if Erickson is right? Morality starts at home.

If biochemistry and physiology of  are the elements of every mix, then results are assured