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World AIDS Day - How it relates to world hunger and nutrition emergencies
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Sustainability and nutrition solve some of the AIDS/HIV problems locally and around the world. Here's how sustainability works. Farming can solve many problems related to AIDS/HIV. For one example, see the article, "In Africa, Fighting Aids by Farming." Babies born to HIV-infected mothers can be HIV-negative with the proper treatments. But for the treatments to work correctly, nutrition has to be adequate.
Locally in your neighborhood, you can fight HIV/AIDS by local urban farming/produce gardening among city streets or in rural areas. Inexpensive-to-build solar cooking stoves complement local produce farming by using the sun instead of earth-based fuel to cook food. See Solar Cookers International.
How can you get started fighting AIDS locally and nutritionally at little cost to you? You could begin by checking out the site and programs for Slow Food USA ®.
Twenty-two years ago, the first World AIDS Day brought everyone to international awareness of how world hunger and nutrition is connected to the HIV and AIDS epidemic that has reached almost every corner of the world. The timing of this year's World AIDS Day. Only two years ago recent surveys found that AIDS was responsible for 2 million deaths, including 270,000 children.
AIDS and HIV connects to the topic of nutrition in places such as South Africa where hunger is persistant. Distribution of food is not what it should be. Conditions are poor and the infection rate is 12%, but some experts find cause for optimism. See the Dec. 1, 2009 Atlantic Wire article, "Optimism Despite Grave Challenges on World AIDS Day," by Max Fisher. In the USA, hunger also creeps into school lunch programs for the needy.
What World AIDS Day means to those writing in the field of nutrition is that prevention is of utmost important, and prevention begins with clean water, healthy food,and sustainable urban farming. What helps prevent AIDS is often the overlooked need of solar cooking stoves and rooftop or other urban farming methods, clean water, and medical care.
The problem starts with hunger. Up the road are the blood transfusions contaminated with viruses, the children born with AIDS from infected parents, the dirty needles, and other societal causes of AIDS. At the root of the tree of infection lies hunger.
The world needs a sustainable plan, not bypassing local governments for temporary treatment that lasts a short time. Prevention comes first, and the first step to prevention points to solving the hunger problems, the clean water issues, and solar cooking stoves.
All these methods that begin with nutrition also begin with local ownership. If local governments around the world and in the USA won't help, then who will be responsible and step up to deliver services? Who's monitoring and evaluating programs?
Nutritionists say you fight AIDS by local farming. See the Atlantic Magazine article, "James McWilliams looks to Rwanda." Local farming and urban farming on a family by family basis gets results. Back here in the USA we have organizations such as Slow Foods. If we look overseas, scientists report that most HIV patients around the world, and in the USA don't have access to enough nutritious food.
No one tells patients that the HIV and AIDS treatment medicines won't work unless the patients eat a healthy diet. The biggest problems to be solved with AIDS and HIV treatments is how to help malnourished people. Who's telling patients that the drugs aren't working because they and their children are not eating a good diet? Do the patients know what they should be eating, what's a healthy diet in their part of the world, according to their own cultures?
And who's watching the watchers, monitoring and evaluating the programs, and reporting results? So to solve this problem, you start with urban and local farming for better food. In the USA, you start with local urban areas turned into urban gardens that apartment dwellers can turn to for growing vegetables and fruits, especially putting greenhouses on urban lots so vegetables can be grown all year round.
If you travel from third world countries to urban inner cities in the USA, a lot of people have no access to fresh fruits. Some have never seen the healthiest vegetables or learned to like the taste. Is it because babies are being fed teeth-rotting sugar water to keep them from crying when hungry or malnourished?
HIV and AIDS patients around the world are suffering from a nutrition gap. How many teenagers after high school are going around the world before starting college being activists by starting local farming collectives for HIV-positive patients? You can go to Rwanda or work in your own neighborhoods.
Or you can go to your own inner city and start local farming collectives on empty lots, if you get permission from the empty lot owners. If you approach apartment complexes, ask the landlords whether you can start an urban farming garden in the backyard of an apartment complex.
You don't have to travel far. Some gardens can be on the grounds of the apartment complex. Others have roof gardens, if the roofs can bear the weight of soil and vegetable farming.
The big problem to solve on World AIDS Day is to bridge the nutrition gap using local means. Start a Slow Food project or a local farming collective today to serve HIV-positive people in any urban area of any town in the USA or abroad. It's all about nutrition through agriculture. It's an initiative you can take to go greener.
In other countries, people with HIV/AIDS are marginalized. They're discarded and thought of as not being able to grow their own food to have a healthier diet. But projects that exist today, for example, in Rwanda, Africa, have shown that people are growing their own food, getting treatment for their HIV and AIDS conditions, and even making money selling surplus vegetables and fruit. They've learned that the HIV and AIDs medicines won't work well enough to help them if their diets are not nutritious.
A report released in October 2009 by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNAIDS found that 42 percent of people in the developing world who carry HIV now have access to life-extending medications. So who do you turn to? You could start with nonprofit groups such as Slow Food. Or you might research the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation.
Maybe you'd like to research the big pharmaceutical companies for the cheap distribution of AIDS drugs in poorer nations. They do reduce prices for the poor in various countries that need drugs for treatment of AIDS and HIV.
You could read magazine articles on how much money has been promised but not yet delivered for global AIDS? Who is going to pay the $50 for global AIDS that's needed right now? Who has enough money now to create a Global Health Initiative centered around women?
If no one steps up to the plate with money, the cost-efficient solution to the AIDS/HIV problem might start more cheaply, with everyone touting urban farming, helping those in their neighborhoods, locally as well as overseas showing women how to do local urban farming--gardening, not by growing roses, but by growing produce for food.
HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death and disease among women. The first farmers ten thousand years ago, probably were women who already were gathering roots and fruits, beans and greens in the wild, and while at home caring for the children, began to notice seeds sprouting as they sat on the ground.
Even the first pregnancy test among ancient peoples focused on urinating on wheat and barley seeds. If they sprouted, the woman was supposedly pregnant, based on then unknown hormones in human and animal urine that causes seeds to sprout sooner than with water alone.
So if women were probably the first gatherers and farmers, and if nowadays women are dying from AIDS at greater numbers than men, to solution is to get women back to local farming, whether in the ten-foot-square backyard of an apartment complex in an inner city anywhere in the world, or in agricultural areas.
Remember that World AIDS Day is a nutrition-related issue that can be helped by local agriculture. Who wants to start or work with an exiting Global Health Initiative centered around women?
You might wish to look at the US Ark of Taste. It's a catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction. By promoting and eating Ark products you can help ensure they remain in production and on the world's plates. For example, you can make an effort to save one cherished food product at a time.
Solar Cookers International (in Sacramento) (zero carbon cooking) launched an online campaign, Nov. 24, 2009 with a video where people can make a fifty-dollar donation that will allow SCI to provide one of the neediest families on earth with a Solar Cookit system and necessary training. Donors of the $50 CooKit systems will receive certificates showing a woman with a solar cooker next to the large pile of wood that will not have to be gathered or burned as a result of the tax deductible carbon offset contribution. Check out the video at the Solar Cookers International (SCI) website.
Two billion of the world’s poorest people cook on open fires. During the past few years, climatologists have discovered that the toxic “black carbon” smoke from these fires is one of the planet’s leading causes of global warming. It is also the most easily avoidable. Solar cooking is a simple, safe way to cook food without needing to acquire and burn fossil fuels.
It's one more step in the fight against AIDS/HIV that is linked to issues of not having adequate nutrition for treatments to work properly. What can you do for World AIDS Day?
Provide renewable resources in any way you choose. In a world of scarcity, violence goes down when there's no more fighting over fuel, food, or access to healthcare. That applies to local neighborhoods in urban areas, rural enclaves, and well as villages in far-away locations. Maybe it's time to help fight AIDS/HIV with Slow Food USA ® projects or an attitude of caring and taking an interest in the numerous links to nutrition, hunger, and World AIDS Day projects.
Resources
- How Obama is Changing Bush's AIDS Plan , Newsweek
- Good Year in AIDS Fight , U.S. News & World Report
- Obama's AIDS Grade , The Huffington Post
- Fighting AIDS by Farming , The Atlantic
- Obama's Global AIDS Grade: D+, Matthew Kavanagh (Huffington Post)
- A Good Year in the Fight Against AIDS (US News & World Report)
- 2008 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic
- The Pepfar Paradox - AIDS Treatment Program (Newsweek)
- In Africa, Fighting Aids by Farming
- Slow Food USA ®
- US Ark of Taste
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