Answer: D. Reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS in the country
Explanation:
Answer:
D. Reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS in the country
Explanation:
A political economy of HIV/AIDS falls short, however, of explaining the suspicion in South Africa of science and orthodoxy—a suspicion that is widespread and not confined to the president and his advisers. Examining objective social causes does not preclude an understanding of the politics of AIDS as a subjective phenomenon.16 A political anthropology may make some sense of what is often presented as merely irrational.
The global controversy created by the president was preceded by several local controversies involving the government. In 1996 the government was accused of wasting public money on a musical show that was supposed to spread the message of prevention. In 1997 it was criticised for officially supporting a treatment, Virodene, that was later identified as an industrial solvent with no benefit. And from 1998 it was denounced for blocking the use of antiretroviral drugs, which the government justified by citing the drugs' side effects.17 In all these arguments, as well as in the virus versus poverty controversy from 2000, two closely linked features appear. The first is the racialisation of the issues, with the government accusing its opponents, whether activists or politicians, of racism. The second is the theme of conspiracy against Africans, either from the country's white conservatives or from the pharmaceutical industry. Both features combine in the somewhat contradictory notion that the AIDS epidemic and its treatments are part of a plot to eradicate the black population.
In South Africa racialisation and conspiracy are rooted in history, and the realm of public health is not exempt from their effects. Epidemics have often been used to enforce racial segregation. The bubonic plague of 1900 in Capetown was used to justify the mass removal of Africans from their homes to the first “native locations” under the first segregationist law, passed in 1883 and called, significantly, the Public Health Act.18 When AIDS appeared in South Africa it was immediately interpreted in racist terms: some white leaders evoked a supposed African “promiscuity;” they denounced the danger that infected black people posed to the nation; and they even publicly rejoiced over the possible elimination of black people by the disease, as one member of parliament did in 1992.19 As has recently been shown, in the last years of apartheid government laboratories were developing chemical and biological weapons (including anthrax, intended to eliminate black leaders), were researching contraceptive methods to induce sterility in the African population, and were allegedly attempting to spread HIV through a network of infected prostitutes.20
So, what could be seen elsewhere as unfounded suspicion was in South Africa plain reality, historically attested. Remarkably overlooked for purposes of national reconciliation, this history still remains deeply present to many South Africans and explains much of the mistrust towards Western science, medicine, and public health.
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1125376/
