Stephen Lewis asks tough questions about the end of AIDS in Africa

published on September 9, 2014 in Straight.com

Stephen Lewis sounded exhausted as he spoke on the phone from Montreal.

“I don’t know,” he said. The former UN secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa repeated the phrase several times. “It feels as if the whole world is in a tailspin of lunacy.”

The question was about the international community waiting until a point of crisis before it responds to a problem. The example was the Ebola virus in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the disease has killed more than 2,000 people and infected thousands more. But Lewis noted it could have been in reference to Islamist militants in Iraq or civil wars in Syria and the Central African Republic.

“Every time you turn on the television or pick up the newspaper, it’s another aching reservoir of horror,” he continued. “I just can’t get over it.”

Lewis isn’t a pessimist. A few minutes later, he expressed optimism talking about his new students at McGill University, where he began teaching a class on global health the same day he was reached by the Georgia Straight.

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He praised Julio Montaner, for example, director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. In 2006, Montaner began pushing a strategy known as “treatment as prevention”. Since then, governments and nonprofits around the world have adopted highly active antiretroviral therapy as a means not only of treating the virus but of minimizing its transmission from parents to children. “I don’t think Canadians understand the impact of what Julio has done,” Lewis said.

Travis Lupick
Straight.com
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Stephen Lewis asks tough questions about the end of AIDS in Africa

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