Paul Farmer isTHE man! I absolutely admire him. He is the one who in 2001 advocated for HIV treatment to be made available in rural areas of developing countries. Now, he is advocating for cancer care to be made available in developing countries. I will never forget the eyes of this malian woman whom the medical team I was with diagnosed with a cervical cancer. She probably knew even before she came that she would die, probably hoping to be saved by the white doctors. Her eyes were filled with so many emotions: resignation, strenght, sadness, despair, fear, hope… It is terrible how life is cheap in Africa. Even when people get to the clinic, the quality of the services are often poor…

There would apparently be a link between cancer and HIV.Could it be because HIV affects immunity? I have yet to investigate that.

I am reading "28 stories of AIDS in Africa" and in the first chapter, the author discusses the origin of HIV. The first documented case originated inDRCin 1959. It took some 20 years before it was discovered (as AIDS)!!! So it had plenty of time to flourish in Africa.

The author wrote: "Few people outside Africa seem to understand the epic gravity of what is happening here. When I talk to people at home about the pandemic, I get the sense that they feel a dying African is somehow different from a dying Canadian- that Africans have lower expectations or place less value on their lives. That to be an orphaned fifteen-year-old thrust into caring for four siblings or a wife thrown out of her house after she tells her husband she is infected- that somehow this would be less terrifying or strange for a person in Zambia or Mozambique, then someone in Canada."

This world is really two-tiered…