Students Organize To Fight AIDS in Africa

Nearly 50 students packed into the Land Auditorium at the Kennedy School of Government last night for the kick-off meeting of the Harvard AIDS Coalition (HAC), a new student group formed to combat the AIDS crisis in Africa.

HAC--founded by Benjamin M. Wikler '03, John E. Raskin '03 and Andy D. Litinsky '04--plans to spearhead a national student movement to lobby the government to increase allocations for AIDS programs.

"We're starting a campaign from scratch here," Raskin said. "This could become an enormous student network."

But the students plan to start small--laying the groundwork by writing letters to members of Congress and contacting similar groups at other universities.

HAC already has an office at the Center for International Development (CID) and the group plans to attend a rally at the State House on Monday to call for more affordable AIDS drugs for Africa.

HAC's kick-off meeting last night featured impassioned student speeches and compelling statistics.

Amir Attaran, an international health researcher at CID, was the evening's primary speaker.

He began with examples to give the students a sense of the immediacy of the crisis in Africa.

"If I just give you the numbers--that 2.4 to 3.2 million people will die this year [of AIDS-related illnesses]--you won't understand the magnitude. We need to try to relate things in a common way," he said.

"Think back to a time when you were in high school," he told the audience. "Say there are 30 students in your class. Visualize the classroom, then divide it in two-thirds."

Attaran paused.

"Those two-thirds are the people who are going to die," he said. "That is the picture of AIDS in Africa."

The AIDS epidemic in Africa is particularly devastating to children, Attaran said.

A child born in Zambia today is more likely than not to die of AIDS, Attaran told the silent auditorium.

"This is the single largest pandemic since the Black Plague," he said.

Attaran said support from energized student groups is the only hope for the African AIDS crisis.

"Government programs are so drained of passion you'd think they'd been giving blood each day for the last two years," Attaran said. "They've failed us in terms of advocacy."

Funding is the most important aspect of the crisis where the student input can have a powerful impact, he said.

"The U.S. is dead last among the rich countries in how much of our national income goes to foreign interests," Attaran said.

In Zambia, he said, teachers are dying of AIDS as quickly as they can be trained.

And the problem will not be contained within Africa, Attaran warned the audience.

"These problems will pose grave security risks that will eventually touch the U.S., Europe and all other wealthy countries," he said. "We can't afford to be complacent."