AIDS Corps

The Institute of Medicine is calling for an effort along the lines of the Peace Corps, to fight AIDS worldwide. It sounds good to me. It's a good idea to push the idea of community when fighting AIDS since it is a communicable disease and we are all at risk. But I'm not sure even it gets at one of the biggest causes of the epidemic. Most people involved with the situation say that we can't fix the problem with treatment alone; we have to work the prevention angle. I'd go a step further and say that unless women are economically empowered to be able to be independent of men, prevention plans aren't going to work either. So there are two big things that need to be done (condoms and the economic empowerment of women) and they are both counter to most traditional cultures and the will of the Catholic Church, which is influential in many of the most desperate countries. Any effective plan will have to deal with those two stumbling blocks.