Melee Over AIDS Drugs In South Africa

Whilst the rest of the world continues on, oblivious to the pain and suffering of those less fortunate who face not only starvation, and now a pestilence of which one is known as HIV which will cause AIDS, some who are left to fight for their lives are also fighting for the drugs that could help them.

Link

(AP) Police fired rubber bullets and smoke grenades to disperse hundreds of protesters demanding the government speed up the provision of life-prolonging AIDS drugs, officials said Wednesday.

More than 20 people were injured — one of them seriously — in the melee Tuesday at Frontier Hospital in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, according to activists from the Treatment Action Campaign.

Police said there were no casualties at the scene, but some people may have been hurt in the stampede of people fleeing the area.

Hospital staff called the police when protesters forced their way into wards, intimidated staff and disrupted services, Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kutelo said. The TAC maintained the demonstration was peaceful.

Police spokesman Superintendent Gcinikaya Taleni said organizers did not notify authorities of their intention to demonstrate, as required.

Welcome to the world ignorance and oblivion has brought you.

These people are facing a life without everything, everything you and I take for granted.

Imagine living without food for weeks, then think of what it would be like to discover you have AIDS?

This is ignorance on a supreme scale, NO one really cares, why?

Because they are Africans?

If they were white and more near you would you understand their struggle for medications that could save them for a little longer? Or would you just shoot them and be done with it?

Rubber bullets?

Against a people seeking relief from an AIDS pandemic, which kills more than 600 people a day in South Africa alone.

I know, you don't care, it does not directly affect you or anyone very close to you. though it could one day.

Now back to your regular discussions. Move along here, nothing to see, just some poor Africans fighting for there lives, if starvation alone does not interest any of you, why would people facing the infections that cause AIDS?

Save the drugs for the good white people!


ESP

I dont think it is because people dont care, i think it is because stress of modern living having less spare time having to work more hours living in a more and more crowded planet debt problems. people cant take on other peoples problems when they have enuff of there own to cope with..

it is sad but true that there will always be alot of people in poverty and struggling to stay alive simply because of the greed of us (western society as a whole).

We always want something else and arent willing to give without taking something in return.

I hate to be a pessimist but with the corrent pwople in power across the world we can never truly think there will be no poverty. I do feel for these people, but just as alot of other people on this planet, I couldn't take a risk on giving up everything I have for soemone that may not understand what it is I am doing for them. Not that it is their fault.

Lately I've been thinking greatly about how western society lives, and that possibly the reason that we are able to live such decadent lives (in comparison to the people mentioned in this thread) is that these people live the way they do.

If we all agree that resources are limited, which I hope we do, then what we are seeing here on a large scale is people taking more than they need, in fact, taking ten times what they need. So for one person to have more than their share, others begin to go without it, plug a few billion people and industrialization into that equation and you have a whole lot of people dying that don't really need to.

This is the way of the world, but I wouldn't go so far as to tell you to get used to it, those who have more may eventually see first hand how it is to live with less. And if there ever was a time for that to happen, it would be this coming century, I'd bet on that actually. (and I don't ever gamble)

Kinda makes me wonder how many people have really found out where HIV & AIDS really came from?

But then, even the source that I linked to may have questionable reliability...