Bdos: HIV/AIDS not ethnic cleansing

THE spread of HIV/AIDS across countries, cultures and lifestyles should prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the disease does not, indeed cannot, discriminate on the basis of ethnicity.

This fact appears to be lost on officialdom in Barbados, for we are hearing from influential members of this society that Blacks are being singled out for extinction by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Even by the standards of hyperbole well known in political circles, this is an amazing piece of racial rhetoric.

It is an absurdity to suggest that a virus which apparently leapt from primates into humans more than half a century ago would suddenly stop short of crossing imaginary ethnic lines so as to achieve “the immediate extinction of all black people across the world”.

There is no evidence to support that notion any more than there is confirmation of the old conspiracy theory that the disease was an invention of Western science to exterminate non-Whites.

In fact, the technology to produce laboratory specimens was developed only decades after HIV/AIDS had already spread to several countries, initially among homosexuals.

What facilitates Africa’s predicament with this disease, as indeed it also does with Haiti, is an abundance of ignorance, lack of anti-retroviral drugs, and unwholesome lifestyles which, regrettably, too many young Barbadians are enthusiastically imitating.

Here's a guaranteed way not to contract HIV/AIDS, absent a blood transfusion: keep the knees crossed, the pants and the mouth zipped. Uganda has proven that when celibacy and fidelity become social values, incidences of HIV/AIDS dramatically decline.