The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Sunday 1 December 2013

WORLD AIDS DAY 2013: THE PATHOLOGY OF SOCIAL STIGMA

Officially, HIV turned 32 today but the fight to control the single largest killer of the mankind in the contemporary history through its pathological and sociological killing effects is yet to see a pathbreaking breakthrough.

Though, the science of HIV-AIDS has witnessed a regular improvement in the treatment regime over the years reducing the new cases of infection, delaying the transformation of virus from HIV to AIDS stage in the infected persons, even having the rare instances of reports saying of HIV cure like the world debated this year the case of a Mississippi baby.

As reported, a Mississippi baby, who was HIV infected from birth, was found HIV-infection free in a round of medical checkup earlier this year. A CNN report said it happened quite easily. Her antiretroviral medication was stopped when she was 15 months old. She was found infection free when she was taken for diagnosis at her second birthday. Scientists believe it could have been due to the high-dose of the combination of three antiretroviral medicines given to the baby within 30 hours of birth.



It was only the second claim of HIV cure and the first in case of a child after the ‘Berlin Patient’ Timothy Ray Brown was declared HIV-cured in 2007.

Then there have been other claims of cure and advances in the medical R&D on HIV-AIDS telling us the sincere work is being done in-spite of the global geopolitics on providing funds for the research.

The ‘Berlin Patient’ is not a patient anymore. The miracle Mississippi baby is not HIV-infected anymore. They are ‘functionally cured’ of HIV infection.

That is the science part of HIV-AIDS epidemic. The scientific achievements and improvements do give us reasons to hope for a better life and enhanced protection and security from the killer medical circumstances of the viral epidemic, but its sociological aspect leaves us staring in the dark, damaging in process, whatever little the medical advancement achieves.

Yes, there are attempts globally to create and spread awareness about HIV-AIDS to reduce and end the discrimination against the infected people. There are multiple campaigns running globally and nationally in many countries. Work being done by India’s NACO (National AIDS Control Organization) is exemplary. There are many transnational agencies working out tirelessly to make the societies more inclusive for the HIV-AIDS affected people.

Events like the World AIDS Day are telling examples of the hard work being put into. From a one-day event, it has been extended into a theme-based campaign running throughout the year.

Though, it is the 25th anniversary of the World AIDS Day this year, if we, still, cannot talk about the progresses made in containing HIV-AIDS in a satisfactory way, it is because of the social discrimination and apathy towards the HIV-AIDS affected.

The social stigma associated with HIV-AIDS continues. And it is universal. The discrimination - it is not just by the uneducated, less educated, unaware, or poorly-aware, but it is also by the people considered to be from the social classes who could show the way in bringing the HIV-AIDS affected to the mainstream of the society, thus giving them the dignified life they deserve, just like you and me. Reports are common that even doctors refuse the treatment once they find the patient is HIV/AIDS affected. Schools refuse or expel such students. Societies, even the most civilized ones, from the upper, opulent level of the social formation, easily make the HIV/AIDS affected an outcast.

The HIV-AIDS affected, who can live a normal life, just like you and me, if we let them, not treating them as outcasts – they form a large part of the global human population - WHO and UNAIDS put them at 35.3 million. How can we exile them, leave them to die?

Whatever small or big achievements we achieve medically year-on-year to talk about on days like the World AIDS Day, we, as a society, cannot head anywhere until we check this problem, until we give the HIV-AIDS affected people a life that we live, until we see them as the normal people just like us, until we give them their right to a dignified life back that we have usurped from them.

Science can lead us to the control and cure of the pathological symptoms of HIV-AIDS, but what about our very own pathological symptoms that push us to treat the HIV-AIDS affected people as the social outcasts?


They need our care, our support, the emotional connect, to win the fight against HIV-AIDS. Can’t we give them their rightful due? 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/