The pandemic no-one talks about anymore

One would have thought that more than three decades since the HIV/Aids pandemic first reached our shores, we would by now be well on our way towards eradicating or making it such a small issue that no-one talks about it any more.

The aim to create an AIDS-free generation by 2030 seems very much like mission impossible in SA. We have the world’s biggest antiretroviral treatment program.

We presently have the world’s largest number of people living with HIV, one in five HIV positive people resides in SA.

Of the 1.5 million global new HIV infections in 2020, 240,000 were from here. If these statistics don’t shock you,

the following one just might — each week in SA, 2,000 girls and women aged 15 to 34 are infected with HIV.

This is the generation that grew up being bombarded on a daily basis through all available media channels with HIV/Aids messaging and this is the generation that learnt everything to do with the disease and all matters relating to sex education in their respective life orientation classes.

Yet, after all that effort, they are the group most prone to being infected. I will not, for the purpose of this article, delve deep into the possible reason that is.

This is the generation that cannot say they do not know the dangers this pandemic poses and this is the generation that cannot claim they are not aware of safe sex practices.

As a society we cannot allow our children to have their collective futures taken away from them by the society they grow up in.

Clearly, the messaging about the dangers of this pandemic need to be looked at on a fundamental level. Clearly, people are not abstaining, clearly people are not condomising, not every time anyway. Clearly people are not mutually faithful to their partners.

Whatever message these awareness campaigns are transmitting-they are now no longer effective.

People have basically thrown caution to the wind. Perhaps we, as a country, are victim to our own successful and comprehensive antiretroviral treatment program.

People no longer see gaunt and dying people in their midst as was the case just 15 years ago. People living with HIV are no longer discernible to those who are not, thanks to the very successful ARV treatment programme.

This and message fatigue might be the reason we are where we are today. On Wednesday David Mabuza, our disappearing deputy president, was in Xikundu village in Limpopo at an event commemorating World Aids Day.

No doubt, millions of rand were spent on this event and the government would have been satisfied that they had done something.

We hold these events all over the country every year and yet the pandemic shows no sign of slowing down. We print billions of pamphlets and flight countless media adverts and campaigns and yet the pandemic keeps marching on.

People have campaign fatigue and the slogans no longer carry any meaning to them.

Any campaign that doesn’t cause people to change their behaviour in any noticeable way must be changed and we do not seem to have realised that. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, we still need to repackage our HIV/Aids messaging and make it the centre of our health awareness programs.

Covid-19 has an over 90% recovery rate — HIV/Aids has a zero rate.

Once you contract HIV, it is for life. That is the reason we need to focus on it even more decisively, our futures depend on it — literally.