Bombay to Burgh

As I ramp up for the big trip back to bharat, my attention turns to my India-attuned RSS feeds.  Yes, it sounds like it could be the title of a Gus Van Sant vehicle.  But the phenomenon is pure Larry Clark - call center employees shacking up after hours (and it ain’t for accent-neutralization practice) and creating a growing epidemiological sinkhole just now being noted by the experts.  Now whether this is acknowledged as a problem serious enough to illicit some straight talk about HIV/AIDS prevention in India shall remain to be seen.  It’s an endless debate regardless of culture, though.  In my days as a cub school board reporter for the Post-Gazette, I witnessed the resistance of a few outspoken moralists in southwestern PA to any kind of non-abstinence-based HIV/AIDS education in public schools.  You can also see it in the machinations of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which dumps a significant amount of its total funding into abstinence-based programs that fly in the face of human behavior.  I’m no expert in these matters - I leave that to my good colleagues at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health - but it seems logical that any truly effective public health policy has to dispense of these moral issues and dispel the smokescreens they create if any disease is to be at all controlled.  But maybe that’s the root of the problem that people have with public health initiatives - cold, hard, scientific facts can be scary and sometimes tough to rationalize and accept.  Here’s hoping that things don’t get too much worse before they get better.