Agenzia Fides

Rome (Fides Agency) - The cause for the outburst of AIDS is the HIV virus, but poverty helps its widespread contagion. Where there is poverty, there is AIDS. If only we think that in Africa there are 70% of the HIV positive people in the world, we understand how poverty and HIV walk hand in hand. Numbers of AIDS sick people in the world are disquieting: 40 million people are infected, 29 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 3 million children less than 15 years old are sick, 13 million children are orphans because of AIDS, in 2010 orphans will be more than 25 million and 6,000 people are infected every day in the world.
The book “Guarire fino in fondo” (To Recover Completely), edited by people belonging to the Community Pope John XXIII who work on a daily basis, in different parts of the world, close to people with AIDS, looks into these numbers and tries to offer a glimpse of hope for the future. To defeat AIDS, they say, it is necessary to go to the roots of evil: to cancel poor countries’ foreign debt; to re-establish the principle of equal representation in the IFM, in the World Bank, and WTO, and renovate their policies; to twin rich countries and poor countries; to institute an international court of duties; to promote solidarity business choices; to adopt a responsible and sober lifestyle; to promote policies of respect for human rights; to make people and resources available and grant 0.7% of GIP for cooperation to international development before 2010. “We have been working for years on the front of the AIDS epidemic in Italy and other countries in the world”, explains Fr Oreste Benzi in the book’s preface, “Later there was the problem of many children born HIV positive from drug-addict mothers or abandoned in the hospital. We responded by welcoming these children in families and family homes. At the beginning of the nineties the Community was called to intervene in Africa on the problem of children whose parents had been killed by AIDS, and that is how all our work in the African continent began”. (P.L.R.) (Fides Agency 2/6/2004 - lines 19 words 319)