The other global crisis

Despite the significance of Sept. 11, the defining event of our generation worldwide is still the AIDS epidemic. Reason number one: AIDS will define the early decades of the 21st century — the years when our generation assumes leadership.

But HIV infection must be addressed now. And it must be addressed by young people because it affects them more than anyone else. In South Africa, half of all living 15-year-olds will die of the disease before they turn 35.

Young people are, almost by definition, risk-takers. They are also more likely than any other age group to sleep with multiple partners. When you combine risky behavior with sex, you create the perfect conditions for HIV to spread.

In South Africa alone, 1,700 people are infected daily. The problem might be worse elsewhere, but there are so many difficulties involved in reporting infection rates that nobody actually knows the severity of the problem.

Access to information about the disease is crucial in the fight against it. So is the ability to understand that information. It's no surprise then that the disease hits hardest places with the least-educated people and the least-efficient ways to access information.

That's one reason the disease is sweeping through Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean — the places least equipped to address the problem. In some places HIV infection is climbing to more than 30 and 40 percent of the population.

But so what? Diseases, epidemics even, kill people all the time in other parts of the world. Why should young Americans care about people dying of a disease that is pretty well controlled in the United States?

First, AIDS slows the development of the developing world. Governments divert vast sums of money from development initiatives to combat the disease. Or more often, governments neglect the disease while an entire generation of their populations die. And since young people are the group most highly infected, the generation dying is youth, the next generation of a country's leaders and laborers.

The issue is not whether AIDS will destabilize the developing world — which is already quite unstable. The issue is whether AIDS will make it more difficult for the developing world to become developed. AIDS sustains the vicious cycle of poverty and disease that has ravaged the developing world for the past century.

Then there's the moral responsibility. The United States and Europe have long profited from the natural resources and low-cost labor in Africa and some of the other devastated regions HIV is gripping. The legacy of colonialism and apartheid — seen in the masses of undereducated Africans and the entrenchment of rural and urban poverty — are facilitating the spread of the virus. The West has an obligation to help, considering all it has done to hurt.

Third, while young people spread AIDS more than anyone else, young people are also the only hope for ending the crisis. Slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS is our responsibility — as individuals and as a generation.

In the next two weeks, each member of Congress will decide whether to sign a letter urging President Bush to donate $1 billion to the global AIDS efforts. One billion dollars can put a million people on AIDS treatment for a year, pay for school, food and housing for a million AIDS orphans and buy tens of billions of condoms to prevent millions of new infections. Congressmen hear from their constituents so infrequently that when they do, it leaves an impact. A group of students recently founded a Princeton chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign to lobby Congress on the issue. But it is more important for individuals to act — call your congressman and tell him to sign on. Adam Frankel is a Wilson School major from New York, NY. He can be reached at afrankel@princeton.edu.