Marseille 2007
| Abstract #168 - Identity issues and neo-traditional treatments for AIDS in West Africa | ||||
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Session: 26.10: Posters B (Poster) on Tuesday in Chaired by Authors: Presenting Author: Dr Emmanuelle Simon - CRECSS/UPCAM, France |
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| Additional Authors: Dr Marc Egrot, Dr Bernard Taverne, Dr Abdoulaye Traor, | ||||
| Aim: For about twenty years, neo-traditional treatments (improved remedies, phytotherapeutic products, etc.) offered to PLWHA have appeared within the therapeutic space of AIDS in Africa. This study is part of a program financed by ANRS/Sidaction Anthropology of neo-traditional treatments for AIDS in West Africa whose objectives include: inventorying products; identifying actors; analyzing legitimization procedures, the process for instilling confidence in patients and PLWHA and the interaction with ARV adherence. | ||||
| Method / Issue: Data were collected in urban areas (Benin, Burkina Faso and Senegal), through qualitative and comprehensive ethnographic methods (interviews, observations, treatment review and advertisement, website and press review). | ||||
| Results / Comments: Their success is linked to the globalization of health systems, especially through international policies to promote traditional medicines and those for HIV/AIDS prevention including training aimed at traditional-therapists. The enduring absence followed by insufficient implementation of programs for access to care on the continent has also contributed to spreading the idea that biomedicine was incapable of curing the illness, leaving the field open to inventors of neo-traditional products. The discourse surrounding these products, which is focused on the revival of local cultures, has milked this same globalization (origin of the virus traced to human manipulation in the North; accidental spread or not; SIDAthe French acronym for AIDShence re-baptized as Syndrome Invented to Decimate Africans). It constitutes a response that mirrors stigmatizations that point the finger at the continent as the land where the illness originated and at prevention policies conveying an ideology that associates the virus propagation with specific African behaviors. With the arrival of ARVs and their unequal access, the dividing-line that emerged between North and South promoted the explosion of critical discourse toward the medical and scientific milieu presented as a paragon of the White world. This discourse included: accusations toward pharmaceutical firms and actors in public health (economic cynicism or racist conspiracies); scientists (African population as a guinea pig); but also criticisms about ARVs (cost, side effects, even harmful consequences); then generics (cheap drugs headed for the South). Taken together, these criticisms of the Other (doctor, scientist, White person) and these issues are sufficient enough to legitimize neo-traditional products. However, it is interesting to see how this has also informed this sector from the inside; for example, in the development of their recipes: a Beninese plant originating from America for a malady invented in the United States or recipes drawn from the stock of local knowledge about other Black diseases, such as sickle cell anemia or malaria. | ||||
| Discussion: Viewing the publicity surrounding these drugs, one often observes an attitude of amused contempt. An understanding approach allows us to comprehend how much their emergence is linked to an interpretation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that is based on identity, whichfar from being the re-emergence of anachronismsfits into the singular history of public policies in the fight against AIDS in Africa. | ||||
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