The conditions and care of AIDS victims in Ghana: AIDS sufferers and their relations

Abstract

So far substantial effort has been devoted to the basic research necessary for AIDS prevention and rightly too. What to do with the AIDS patients, the ultimate victims of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), until very recently, had remained almost exclusively the concern of health workers. Sufferers continue to be 'guinea pigs' in the hands of scientific and medical researchers in their frantic efforts to find a cure for the disease. But the long incubation period of the disease means that, even if all HIV transmission were to halt immediately, the number of AIDS cases would continue to grow during the next decade at an average rate of ten per cent a year (Panos Dossier 1992). That aside, the number of AIDS related deaths in some places has already reached alarming proportions, and the impact on families is already manifesting itself in many ways: increasing numbers of orphans, broken families, collapsing family enterprises, loss of family income, growing number of childheaded households, etc. (see Barnett and Blaikie 1992). In economically depressed countries the strain on limited resources has begun to show as inadequate personnel and facilities have to be syphoned off to take care of AIDS patients. The message is quite clear: it is time to look at the other end of the continuum - the AIDS sufferers. It has, thus, become important now to expand discussion of AIDS to include its more general social consequences. In the early years of the epidemic in Africa, Jonathan Mann, the first co-ordinator of WHO's worldwide AIDS program, commented in an interview on German television that African societies had some advantages over Western industrial countries in that AIDS patients would not be isolated, and that their families would look after them. Thus in Africa, the condition of the AIDS sufferer will be better appreciated if it is looked at within the framework of the family.