Iagree his behavior is not the best and as a powerful man in politics it can have an influence on the sexual behavior of a nation
But he is just one person.

His behavior – or any examples you have offered – does not support your arguments in general on HIV
Anyone can get HIV – anywhere.
You are not black, not indigenous south African or African at all!

You are plainly very white

I am not bringing race or colour into this as I feel we are all at risk whatever our colour and where ever we live. But you seem to be

I am white, live in the UK, I have HIV so do millions of white people around the world as well as black and those of every race colour or creed

- it is time all this took a back seat and we looked at HIV prevention as a worldwide issue for everyone whatever their country or colour or race or creed.

You are NOT helping this to happen right now

Veritee XX

Hope you are well?
You have had contact with me before – Veritee

I do appriciate the point you are trying to make but it is with all due respect very out of date.

Thinks have moved on, form this . Yes, much HIV initial spread may have been at first via those who were sex workers or took other risks but it has now moved on to the ordinary population in all parts of the world.

I think you need to catch up with this fact!

I have tried to understand your point of view but now a year or so on from finding I have HIV

- as a woman in my 50s who has never used drugs, never been a prostitute or promiscuous and got it from my husband who I have been married to for over 20+ years and who only had ever one brief sexual encounter in all that time with a woman and got HIV from just that one encounter

I find your ‘take ‘ on HIV increasingly out of date and entrenched.
Things move on

Blame has no place in HIV
It is a virus
A virus that we are all incressingly at risk from whatever country we live in and whatever our lifestyle.

With due respect why don’t you at least try to write another book that catches up with how HIV is now

Veritee

We have not factored in the apartheid regime that neglected the disease initially and spread the rumour that it is a black plague?? And then you had Mandiba who was more concerned to build the nation a stop the blood bath that would have followed had he not personally intervened in some of the occasions. Not that he did not want to address the epidemic – just that country would have plunged into far horrific chaos than HIV is creating today.

Thabo Mbeki and Manto had the opportunity but they wasted it. But Manto was not a totally wasted regime. We forget that she did bring the big pharma companies to their knees in terms of pricing of drugs.

But Dr Beet Root has her weaknesses and one of them was that once she took a stand she vehemently followed and believed in it. Though that trait worked for bringing the prices of the drugs down in South Africa considerably, also worked to keep south Africa free of most vector borne diseases like Malaria, she neglected HIV completely. History will not forget her for this gross neglect.

With rising crime and HIV, people of South Africa believed that they would die of a bullet in a crime before HIV took their lives. And that is how Zuma was born. A person who promised to bring crime down. History will judge him if he is able to deliver on this promise or not.

Amidst all this HIV continues to be a neglected. For example The epidemic amongst ethnic south African Men who Have Sex with Men (MSM) continues to rage. There are able organisations which can deliver a change on this but SANAC rather than partnering with LGBT groups take a sanitized approach of partnering with women organisation to control epidemic for MSM. Goof ups like these are plenty.

Can we say that all South Africans deserve an epidemic in this scenario when the choice sometimes is between dying by a bullet today or by HIV tomorrow…

As a person who has made South Africa his foster home, I would say Elizabeth; you do raise some pertinent points. But we definitely do not deserve HIV.

Your thesis falls down at its conclusion:

> But I think it is time that voters in other countries stopped subsidising the fatally bad
> behaviour of South African leaders. Why should Americans give South Africa over half a billion
> dollars of PEPFAR money a year, in part to promote abstinence, monogamy and condom use, when the
> electorate of the country supports a man who is the embodiment of the behaviours and attitudes that spread HIV?
> Because, you might argue, the government of the richest country in Africa, which is also pocketing
> over US$ 160 million for HIV from the Global Fund, can’t even organise itself to keep anti-retrovirals in
> stock. I’d say that’s all the more reason to stop propping up bad leadership on HIV.

If you suddenly suspended funding on the basis of Zuma being a c**p leader, you’d deny millions life-saving interventions, and at the same time be far more likely to make South Africa’s general leadership behave worse than better. If it was someone less important than the leader who was the problem, e.g. a health minister, then suspending some funds might get them out (as happened in Uganda) but who exactly are you expecting to oust the top man? South Africa’s electorate have no other serious candidate to vote for, and he’s got a very tight grip on the ANC leadership.

Some linking of future funding to improved logistical performance can be made, and there may well be a case for it. But it can’t be an all-or-nothing deal, because cutting funding is a serious business, with lethal consequences. And I seriously doubt that linking funding in any concrete way to better personal behaviour by a country’s leadership is going to yield any fruit at all.

I’m waiting for this too. As well as the Renier and Watkins piece there is a lot of other stuff pointing to lack of evidence to support the multiple and concurrent partners/ behavioural thesis too. See Mark N. Lurie • Samantha Rosenthal, The Concurrency Hypothesis in Sub-Saharan Africa:
Convincing Empirical Evidence is Still Lacking, AIDS Behav (2010) 14:34–37

I don’t see why not; Elisabeth’s moderation is (as far as I can tell) very light-handed, and so long as the “serious conversation” remained reasonably on-topic (which it certainly could), this would seem to be a fine place for it. (It might spin off into a new thread, if EP chose in some instance to continue the theme or a sub-theme in a blog post rather than by adding a comment. That would surely be a good thing, not a bad thing.)

>We all just react to
>Pisani’s generalisations.

I don’t think that’s true; but supposing it were, again surely it isn’t *necessarily* true! (For instance, here I am reacting to a generalization of yours, not of hers.)

So, say something serious about polygyny, and we’ll see where things go from there.

It would be good to have a serious conversation about polygyny, Renier and Watkins and this … http://cl.exct.net/?qs=7fa55f686346aba3739272ba4bf691a04aae648dad102f48ebc8ce5acf8f27bb

But the WoW comment section is not the place to do it. We all just react to Pisani’s generalisations.