Stupid Sex Tricks: More AIDS ignorance in New Guinea

This is what happens when you don’t educate the public enough about AIDS.

Some AIDS victims are being buried alive in Papua New Guinea by relatives who cannot look after them and fear becoming infected themselves, a health worker said Monday.

Margaret Marabe, who spent five months carrying out an AIDS awareness campaign in the remote Southern Highlands of the South Pacific nation, said she had seen five people buried while still breathing.

One was calling out “Mama, Mama” as the soil was shoveled over his head, said Marabe, who works for a volunteer organisation called Igat Hope, Pidgin English for I’ve Got Hope.

“One of them was my cousin, who was buried alive,” she told reporters.

“I said, ‘Why are they doing that?’ And they said, ‘If we let them live, stay in the same house, eat together and use or share utensils, we will contract the disease and we too might die.'”

Okay, this is just wrong on so many levels. First, AIDS isn’t highly contagious; you need either sex or blood-to-blood contact to spread the virus. Second, people with AIDS stand a far greater chance of becoming sick themselves from shared utensils, etc., than well people ever would of contracting the virus.

This is just one more shocking example of how ignorance is worse than the disease itself. I wonder what these people would say if they found out that they are a greater danger to their sick relatives than vice versa!