Hostility to Health

A Slovak politician, skeptical of the facts and figures trotted out by his opponents, used to say, “You can’t fill your stomach with a pretty graph.” Such mistrust of science, where it occurs, is not entirely surprising: Consider the great number of “experts” who discredited themselves through spectacularly imprecise predictions and pointless internecine skirmishes. The public cannot help but feel confused to the point of paralysis by the holding pattern of contradictory studies and untenable claims into which today’s scientific discourse can lapse.

Of course, modern science has made great contributions to our understanding of certain issues. For example, the recently unclassified National Intelligence Council report stating that "the problem of feeding a burgeoning population is not agriculture or science, but rather political stability, transportation and distribution.” Not long ago, this view of the world would have been ridiculed; today, we may call it correct.

But on other matters, our society is stuck—unable to do the right thing even with its striking scientific capacities. HIV, a devastating burden for any country because it produces a generation of orphans, is one area where such failure has been persistent. As late as the 1990’s, half of the World Bank’s AIDS-related projects did not finance or promote condom use. President Bush is continuously derided for his decision to invade Iraq, but the caveat in his large-scale plan for AIDS relief in Africa, which demanded that at least a third of prevention spending go to abstinence-only programs, is, in humanitarian terms, not vastly different from the most criticized choice he made while in office.

In some communities in Africa, parents still believe their children are dying not from AIDS, but from witchcraft. Meanwhile, many HIV activists encourage medical doctors in these contexts to rely on the assistance of traditional healers (who are known to spread the myth that sleeping with a virgin cures diseases. While one NGO in Zimbabwe has already tried to debunk that myth, it is astonishing that donors spend millions of dollars on expensive HIV testing and (comparably) miniscule resources are spent on providing vital information to containing the spread of AIDS.

Although hostility to some information (like sex education) is nothing new, we now know how high the real costs of inaction are. When teenage girls were told in a randomized experiment in Kenya that older men are more likely to be HIV-positive than boys, they made better choices and tried to avoid richer but more dangerous partners.

Under South Africa’s former president, hundreds of thousands people died, according to a Harvard study, because of the denial that HIV is transferred from mothers to their babies (and the refusal to provide appropriate drugs). Still, President Mbeki’s supporters maintained that he was defending the country from the prejudiced ideas inherent in Western science.

There is a crisis of will throughout today’s world, inhibiting both developed nations and those engulfed in this pandemic from picking tested policies over inoffensive alternatives masquerading as fixes. The health of global finance will improve eventually—and with it, the humanitarian foundations and aid programs will persist stronger than ever. But there is little evidence that the approach to actual global health will become results-oriented by that time.


Jan Zilinsky ’09, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Mather House.