U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is calling for action and funding at the starting line. The simple goal? Getting women in developing nations healthy:
“Some simple blood tests, consultation with a doctor and qualified help at the birth itself can make a huge difference,” Mr. Ban said in an address to an international conference in Washington aimed at finding solutions to problems affecting women and girls worldwide.
“Add some basic antibiotics, blood transfusions and a safe operating room, and the risk of death can almost be eliminated,” he told delegates attending the gathering known as the “Women Deliver” conference.
Though Ban is surrounded by abortion right’s activists, he is nonetheless a diplomat who doesn’t want to identify himself as pro-abortion.
None of the new Gates money will go to fund abortions, Gates said, and the U.N. has no official position on abortion other than to support its safety where legal, Ban explained.
While I feel I will disagree with Ban Ki-Moon in the long run, I can back his desire to get things started with the basics and avoid any delays in providing this service.
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Blood testing – a little worrisome given this article in yesterday’s LifeSiteNews
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jun/10060410.html
My daughter wrote a book about AIDS a few years ago and uncovered the fact that blood tests for HIV are not conclusive. They have to be administered several times; but of course in Africa they are not usually done twice to get consistent readings. For instance, testing women during pregnancy often gives false positives. Therefore many women test positive for HIV and are treated thus; so blood testing on African women scares me because it will become an excuse to sterilize them in order to prevent the spread of AIDS.
It is important to keep discrimination potentials in our minds when talking about any kind of testing for sure.
I myself did have my blood taken several times during pregnancy. I think it is common to have your blood drawn during pregnancy, especially the first, as well as before any surgery, which could include an emergency caesarian in a pregnant woman’s case. Blood is taken to determine blood count, clotting ability, etc. and also for HIV. There is a successful drug, antiretroviral, which combats the transmission of HIV from mother to child, so I would assume this is the route in mind when we talk about HIV testing in regards to pregnant women.
The problem with administering HIV tests to pregnant African women is more complex than you might imagine. To begin with, there is more than one type of test, a very sensitive (read: many false positives) “screening test” and a somewhat less sensitive (but still prone to false positives due to the nature of the manufacture of the HIV tests in general, see below for more detail) “confirmatory test”. As you can imagine, these tests are not cheap, and to the best of my knowledge, in Africa where resources are less abundant than, say, here in North America, they stop testing after one positive “screening” test, whereas the protocol here would be TWO screening tests followed by at least one confirmatory test, which, unsurprisingly, eliminates many of the initial “positives” that arise after only one test.
This has the potential to cause a LOT of problems, especially when you add to the mix the fact that the HIV test is an antibody test (NOT a test for actual virus, and which has in fact not ever been verified against the presence of actual virus, something most of us don’t know). Some of the antibodies that the HIV test *can* falsely react to include antibodies produced by human placentas, as well as antibodies that occur naturally in people of African descent, as well as antibodies to various diseases that are common in the third world. You can see the potential for trouble here, especially if you stop at just one test.
I understand the concern about MTC transmission; however, I am concerned about this on several levels. I wonder how many women who discover they are “HIV positive” during pregnancy (quote marks intentional as I suspect many of these are false positives) are pressured to have abortions, and how many more would opt to be sterilised after birth. Also, many women are pressured into taking antiretrovirals, which are not a cure-all as advertised, but can be fatal and can cause serious problems in the children who receive them in utero. (The drugs cause mitochondrial damage; in other words they can mutate one’s cells and lots of these kids are turning up with cancers years later.) Most children born HIV-positive (NOT a majority, by the way) revert to negative with no intervention, because all they have inherited are maternal antibodies without any actual virus. If you are at all interested in some of the things that have happened to children given these drugs, google “Guinea Pig Kids”. You’ll be appalled.
Suffice it to see that we need to tread VERY lightly when offering this kind of medical assistance.
Wow, makes me proud to be Rebecca’s mom.