Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Neela Marikkar: I think our responsibility is great. AIDS is not just in Asia and Africa, it's in India, it's in [inaudible]. And, I think AIDS can be really addressed through poverty alleviation, through better education, better healthcare. It’s not just a question of the necessary drugs, those are important, but I think till you have a good program of poverty alleviation in country in the countries of Africa and in countries like South Asia, this problem will be very difficult to be addressed. I think that the reason being that this disease is mainly [predominant] and mainly affecting the poorest of the poor. Perhaps, if it had been an epidemic in Western world, things might have been very different as to the way the disease would have been addressed. But unfortunately, it is the poorest of the poor countries and the poorest in those countries that seem to be more affected by the disease. It’s encouraging to see Bill Clinton and Bill Gates take strong initiatives to raise awareness of AIDS and the work that The Gates Foundation is doing is incredibly good, very positive. And it is only by raising awareness of the tragedy of this disease and the impact it is having on these continents that they can hope to change the perception and to get more and more people wanting to do something about it, to get more engaged in trying to resolve this issue. So, I think yes, it is a very great responsibility; all of us have to do something about it.

by Neela Marikkar

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Oliviero Toscani: Our responsibility, it is big, not just for AIDS. AIDS is a consequence of a lot of other problem which we are responsible. We are also responsible now to do something to solve the problem. Probably, the responsibility is more of the fact that we don’t really do much for AIDS. I don’t know, it seems to me that AIDS has gone out of fashion, it is not anymore fashionable to deal with AIDS, to talk about AIDS, and to do something for AIDS, but the problem is bigger. And Africa is a major surviving and probably our responsibility is the fact that we don’t really care anymore so much lately about that major African problem. Well, we are to make AIDS fashionable again problem is for the media and for the communication and without communication we won’t really proceed.

by Oliviero Toscani

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Oscar Olivera: Responsability of whom? Of us? The people? The plain workers? Of the people who have AIDS? Or of that whole economic and political system, that is oppressing and that is contributing to the worldwide spreading of disasters like AIDS? I think the responsibility is not ours, the peoples’. It’s the responsability of the system, of the economic model, of the political model of exclusion, of racism, which has been designed and implemented by the huge economic and military powers of the world. It’s there responsibility. Our responsibility is to change this world, this model of a structure of [], of disease, of exclusion, of famine, in order that AIDS disappears.

by Oscar Olivera

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Paul Knight: I think we all have a responsibility to do what we can for humankind. And from that respect we need to be doing something about the AIDS issue in Africa. Millions of people are dying. And we’re letting it happen. We have drugs that can start addressing this problem but we don’t share them around because of copyright issues and intellectual property of drug companies and the fact that they protect these things. Once again we’ve got issues around the market forces in economics. We really do need to change economic environments we work in so we can be focusing on humankind. And AIDS is one of those issues that as a society we need to change. The ironic thing in this is that a lot of people aren’t addressing it. The problem that creates is it reduces the capitalist market size within our economies and the potential for capitalist market growth because every time somebody dies it’s one less person that we can sell product to. So even from a capitalist perspective we do need to be doing something about the AIDS issue. At the grass roots the real thing is the human beings. Human beings need to be treated with respect. We need to be looking beyond just our own environment and making sure that others are being looked after as well even if they’re disadvantaged for whatever reason. I think we also need to look at what’s driving, what’s developing and what’s propagating the AIDS issue in Africa and how that can be addressed at a societal level in a more holistic way rather than just what’s the root cause of this epidemic. It’s not just a health issue. There’s an economic issue that’s driving it as well. And we need to be working on those things.

by Paul Knight

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Pauline Tangiora: Well, colonization has come to Africa over 500 years ago, that is where the responsibility lies. Within those over the preceding years, the peoples who have come and destroyed the family lives of the people of Africa, the people of the land, who knew how to live, how to survive and many things that have come their way. But with the advent of the multinational/transnational companies, of the mining of the resources within this very, very rich country of minerals has come a way of life for those who have left their homelands to go and work in these sites. This unnatural way of working, away from their families, housed in housing which you wouldn’t put an animal into, so that they can earn a subsistence living has drawn them into such a medical condition. So when you ask, Judith, how big is our responsibility, it is our responsibility, every person’s on this planet, to look to Africa and those multi/transnational companies who continue to house these people in such circumstances, which is a way of life which is not natural. It is not a healthy way of life, and it is a life which we have made sure that to get the riches from the land we have spent very little.

by Pauline Tangiora

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Pico Iyer: Responsibility for its happening is tiny responsibility for its potential solution is vast. And that’s what globalism means, not just rights but responsibilities. Africa is our neighbour and we have to care for it, we have to care about it as we would for our neighbours in Berlin or Los Angeles. We have the research, we have the facilities, we have the money, and all we really need as Bono so eloquently says is the will to do what we can for other people, and I suppose that requires, again a change from within and a different way of conceiving ourselves as not, again, self contained units on one side of the world but parts of something much larger and more inclusive.

by Pico Iyer

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Rachid ElDaif: I have to admit that sometimes I completely ignore problems that are very important and very painful in other parts of the world. And it is a real problem and because there are so many problems in this world you can't care about everything. Just think about what is happening in Lebanon for already thirty years. So how can you care or do something to help in other parts of the world.

by Rachid ElDaif

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Raymond Federman: There are many crises in the world right now but AIDS maybe the most urgent crisis that we must attend to. It spreads! Why? Because of lack of education, because of irresponsibility. We are all in the world morally, medically, educationally responsible to stop the spreading of AIDS in partly in Africa. Why in Africa? Because as I said earlier in another answer, because we have in many ways abandoned Africa to its own plague. We must work to educate the people. We must work. We must force the medical world to do further research. We must work so that the corporation gets involved with this problem and subsidize research and subsidize medication and subsidize cures. If we don’t stop AIDS, it would spread in a world in spite, because its part of our human nature, because it is always connected with sexuality, with the sexual act. Even though some catch this sickness, this crisis, they are mear contagents. We must do everything possible to stop this immediately. I think the most important is of course, education. We must educate the people, we must not but fear in them and let them understand that some of the acts that they do may cause this sickness. We have managed on this planet to eradicate certain sickness. Tuberculosis, which at one time was a strong -- polio, we must do the same for AIDS. Education and cure, research.

by Raymond Federman

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Robbie Conal: Well, again, it’s about being human and what that means in your relationship to other humans, whoever they are, are you feeling them? Are they you? If you are, and if they are, then we are responsible for each other, aren’t we? And do what you can, what we can, you can, I can, that guy, that lady, sure. Whether we are feeling it immediately or next week or last week, we are all interconnected and I think it’s easier to have a sense of that than never before. So, once you are conscious, you are responsible, that’s not the worst thing that could possibly happen to the world. But, there is plenty we can do to help people with diseases anywhere. And I will be grateful for anybody’s help with my diseases, like sarcasm for instance. Help me. I mean, if you want to talk about pharmaceutical companies and making money or making products that actually cure people or prevent diseases, then I have a little bit of an issue of that enterprise as a profit making form of commerce. Then, we have to redefine profit. And that would take a little more than a pharmaceutical company. I don’t know if there is a drug for that. But, I could think of a few that might be mind altering in that way that open us a little bit to rethinking that issue.

by Robbie Conal

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Rodrigo Baggio: AIDS is a big challenge concerning diseases. It is a big challenge, a gigantic challenge, simply gigantic. To know that a big percentage of children in African countries die because of AIDS. It is fundamental to change this situation. I don’t know how. But it is fundamental to change this situation.

by Rodrigo Baggio

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Sanar Yurdatapan: AIDS, hunger, dictatorships, the forces who do not allow Africa to develop are responsible, totally responsible. Well, you cannot take a disease as only one fact; that’s AIDS. AIDS can harm people all around the world; but you see in developed countries, the people are ready and educated to understand how to protect themselves. But in undeveloped countries, ignorance, some traditions, etc. they do not allow to protect themselves. So, when you put them all together, they affect each other and ignorance and hunger and undevelopment grows and grows; and it shows itself indifferent for us. AIDS is just one of them.

by Sanar Yurdatapan

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Santiago Roncagliolo: I do not know if someone can be blamed for AIDS in Africa; probably yes, if the theory that it escaped from some laboratory is true and consequently there is someone responsible; but in any case the social problem of AIDS in Africa has to been seen in conjunction with the lack of information. The main reason why its communication and propagation could be controlled is that the people had access to sufficient information and that the people are conscious of the fact that having sex without a condom is a risk. Maybe, if we focus on what is our responsibility, the question becomes: What can we do? And what can be done to fight it in Africa is above all to spread ideas, to spread information, to spread knowledge among the people. And this is not too expensive, this is something we could do. How big is our responsibility? Considering the way in which this knowledge could be transmitted via international cooperation projects, we can ask our governments to incorporate this. Today, we might even have to ask many other things of them, because today we are responsible for everything we ask our governments to do; in democratic societies, if we wanted them to do this, we would ask for it during the elections and with our votes.

by Santiago Roncagliolo

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Shaobin Yang: Just kidding, if AIDS occurs in the America or Europe, will it be the present situation? I find, this problem is very painful. No matter in Africa or in any other places in the world there would be these AIDS patients, for example, there is a village of AIDS in Henan Province of China. Actually our government feels somewhat inadequate when helping these AIDS patients, because there is no medicine with good effect to cure these patients. Once man gets this disease, he won't be able to work, will lose the ability to work, so the costs of the treatment are very high. Only with the aid of an international organization could these problems be solved, such as offering a kind of medicine with especially good effect to maintain their lives and then they could do something very simple. In this way there would be a relatively healthy trend both mentally and physically. It's not enough just to rely on these civil efforts. I think AIDS is really a big international problem, so developed and developing countries should join up together to control the spread speed of AIDS across the globe.

by Shaobin Yang

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Sihem Bensedrine: This problem is not about guilt. Concerning this disease its not the right way to ask about guilt. I think this disease is a plague, something that arrives and which you didn't want to arrive. We would better ask about the people who do not want to fight back this plague, who do not provide the necessairy instruments which exist and which are on our command. Thats the bad that we have to fight. It's not the birth of the disease or its outbreak. It does not matter how the desease was born or how it broke out. What matters is if we are willing or not to fight it back. And it is this this missing will, these big industrial trusts, the pharmaceutical industrie, who are the origin of this lack of will. Because they are not searching for a solution of this problem but they are searching for profits and if profit comes to the fore it is evident to search there for the guilty ones.

by Sihem Bensedrine

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Sima Wali: The responsibility lies in the drug companies that is driven by profit. We need to make sure that drug companies make cheaper drugs available and into the hands of the AIDS afflicted people. We are basically -- the poor cannot afford these drugs and they cannot -- basically, this is one of the main reason that women who are suffering from this debility and disease in Africa and elsewhere in the world basically are unable to get manufacturing companies to get drugs into their hands.

by Sima Wali

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Simon Retallack: I think every nation that has any consciousness at the global level at all has a duty to help countries in Africa that are suffering from the AIDS epidemic. We have a duty both to provide financial support and informational support but also to revise the system currently in force by the World Trade Organization that protects the patents, intellectual property rights, of the manufacturers of the drugs that can help prolong the lives of people that have AIDS. We know at the moment that very few, the handful of companies that make these antiviral drugs, sell them, sell these drugs for huge profits and actually at a very high price even in developed countries. And, there’s no way the developing countries can afford those prices. Yet, developing countries seek to, in some instances, are seeking to produce their own generic versions of those drugs and are being told that they can’t because it would contravene intellectual property rights which exist internationally. I think that has to change. I think we need to think differently about -- we need to devise a new system that rewards companies for innovation in the pharmaceutical sector and others but doesn’t give them the right to perpetually to seek a rent forever on their creation, particularly when we’re talking about the lives of hundreds of millions of people, which is exactly what we’re talking about with AIDS. And unless we change that system, unless we allow developing countries to buy anti-viral drugs more cheaply than they can do today, we will be condemning and we are, I think, already condemning millions and millions of people to death, and a pretty miserable death at that. So our responsibility is huge. I think countries that suffer from AIDS in Africa also have their own responsibility; their own governments need to do far more to, and particularly I’m thinking in South Africa and other countries in Africa, do far more to acknowledge the scale of the problem and to do far more about it internally than they

by Simon Retallack

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Sohrab Mahdavi: The world is interconnected. So, I mean the question is, I suppose, the degree of responsibility. I’m not sure if I can put any gradation or degree of responsibility on AIDS. I think AIDS is a manifestation of many things including malnutrition, including excess, and by excess I mean that this system is excessive in some parts, and therefore, we have malnutrition and poverty in other parts and AIDS is directly linked to poverty and malnutrition because when the defense mechanism of the body gives in, it snaps. That’s due to some such malnutrition. So, I’m not sure how big our responsibility is, but I know that it’s as big as equality and distributions of wealth.

by Sohrab Mahdavi

Sep 9, 2006 11:05:00 AM cite

Song Kosal: Our responsibility is to help the patients and educate the people to prevent it.

by Song Kosal