Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Cuba's Approach to AIDS

"The population of Cuba is only slightly larger than that of New York City. In the three decades of the global AIDS epidemic, 78,763 New Yorkers have died of AIDS. Only 2,364 Cubans have."  To find out the particulars, see the NY Times article: A Regime's Tight Grip on AIDS.

Cuba, an impoverished country with few resounces, indicates that throwing money at health care is not the answer.

This Times article is enlightening and worth the time to read. Our Public Health service could learn a lot from studying Cuba -- but we choose to demonize that country instead.

A few years back, I visited an AIDS hospital in Cuba.  It was in a rural setting, the staff were humane, and the few patients who lived there were there by choice.  "Institutional" was not a word that came to mind.

Truck-Stop Girls

by  Catherine Maternowska

This fine essay appeared in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, August 23, 2009.  "In May, I was traveling down a South African highway with a colleague and a driver, headed toward Swaziland. A private foundation had assigned me to assess a health clinic that it set up for truckers and the girls and women who trade sex with them for cash and goods. Truckers are well known to transmit H.I.V. up and down the highways. And Swaziland, a small, landlocked country dependent on its busy trucking corridors, is particularly troublesome. It has the highest H.I.V. rate in the world: one in three people is infected..."  Full article "Truck-Stop Girls."