Is our failure to act based in a covert belief that White life is more valuable than Black life?

"What do the global and domestic AIDS epidemics have in common?" Jennifer Flynn, managing director of the Health Global Access Project, asks.

The lack of governmental response is driven by institutional racism, she says.

"AIDS activists used direct action techniques, traditional lobbying skills and just about every advocacy tactic under the sun to ensure that most states could piece together the funding resources to purchase Highly Active Antiretroviral (HART) treatment for those who were unable to pay," Flynn says.

Greed, she says, prevented pharmaceutical giants from selling these drugs at a price Sub-Saharan Africans could afford - "which they easily could because there is a huge mark up. As a result, only 5% of people in the developing world who needed HIV treatment were receiving it in 2003."

In the States, much of the country was finding the money to pay for HIV treatment -- except for Puerto Rico and South Carolina.

Infidelty counters fight

Why are we still losing the fight against the AIDS epidemic?

Infidelity.

James D. Shelton, MD, MPH, science advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development, makes the radical suggestion "that people who have multiple sexual partners drive the spread of HIV. In areas where HIV is widespread, people may not have a large number of sex partners, but they have more than one at the same time," he says.

"Once HIV enters one of these small networks, the entire network is likely to become infected. That makes having multiple concurrent partners more dangerous than serial monogamy...."

Female condoms key to change

"In the late 1990s, public health workers hoped the female condom would overthrow the politics of the bedroom, empower women and stop the AIDS epidemic in its tracks," the New York Times reports.

It didn't because this form of contraception can't be used secretly.

“Condoms are almost undiscussable within a marriage” in Africa, Lois B. Chingandu, the director of an anti-AIDS organization in Zimbabwe, says. “It is something associated with casual sex. If a wife uses a condom, the message is that you have been unfaithful. If she even initiates the discussion, it tips the power scale. Men resist quite a lot, and it can result in violence.”

"What we really need is our political leaders to stand up and tell the truth about what is happening," Lihle Dlamini, a South African who is HIV positive, says. "We need role models who'll tell us whether they themselves are HIV positive or not, who'll say 'you must respect women, you must use condoms.' It's not happening at the moment."

And women must say no or demand their partner use a condom.

"Female condoms must be more widely available so women can take contraception into their own hands and not just rely on the man," she said. "Only about 12 million female condoms are delivered each year in poor countries, compared with about 6 billion male condoms," The New York Times said.

"At the moment you go to the clinic, they give you one. Well how much use is that? People don't just have sex once," Dlamini said.