Without national leadership to deal with public health crisis, fear, denial, and cultural and moralistic barriers to safety will have the same consequences everywhere. The Caribbean already mimics Africa. Except for the wealthy, there are no treatments, hospitals, or care for the infected. Women and children are abandoned by death or flight. There is no work for women supporting families.
Adult infection tops one percent in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand.
In the former Soviet Union, with collapsed health and social structures, prostitution, and related activities also spread it. Without the difficult US awakening and intelligent Vermont public health policy, we, too, would see such explosion. Rather than accept death sentences of ignorance and fear, they tell liberating truth. Rather than take the consequences of individual, societal, and governmental irresponsibility, they define and demand responsibility. The conference was a mass demonstration of rich and poor demanding that humankind reach its potential.