Kirwan Institute Brown Bag - November 2009
November 6, 2009 - HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea
By Lawrence Hammar, Ph.D.
What happens to national HIV programs when Science and Religion collide . . . or worse, when there is little distinction between them? What are the effects upon individual and public health when both ignore the setting of most infections: in or on the way to plain-old marriage?
HIV transmission and the bodily suffering of AIDS have become serious social and public health problems in Papua New Guinea. After long delays, community-, business- and faith-based organisations have launched an impressive multi-sectoral response but that is mostly foreign-funded and conceived. Foreign notions of epidemiology such as “sex worker,” “ABC,” “risk group,” “rural/urban” and “MSM” have gained traction in Papua New Guinea despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary. Each has fueled more than confronted the gendered contradictions of marriage and sexuality. Quantitative approaches driven by the needs of foreign donors than by local needs or capacities have engaged in considerable fetishism, obscuring the original social relations by which people come to be infected and counted as such. Being mobilized in quasi-scientific narratives that are repeated endlessly (e.g., about “the” HIVab seroprevalence of the country’s “sex workers,” or the “exponential increase in rural areas”) disavows both the complexities of gathering relevant information and the dire need for massive rearrangements in social-structure required to begin reversing the increasing trend in HIV transmission.
This Powerpoint presentation draws upon ethnography, public discourse and archival data to critique public health policy and epidemiological modeling in Papua New Guinea. Christian-inflected sex-negativity and anti-condom rhetoric are shown probably to have accelerated, not slowed the pace of HIV transmission and AIDS suffering.
Lawrence Hammar, Ph.D. is now Research Scientist at the Center for Interventions, Treatment and Addictions Research at the Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio. He worked alongside Papua New Guinean colleagues from 2003-2006 during a nationwide study there of HIV, AIDS, STDs, and sexual health and behavior
All sessions will be held in room 423 Mendenhall Laboratory at noon.
For more information, please contact Rajeev Ravisankar.
