Global AIDS: The Big Picture
By Raymond A. Smith
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The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington DC:
Memorializing the global population with HIV would require over 76 miles of
wall. |
76 Miles of Wall: Coming to Grips with the
Global AIDS Epidemic
Throughout
the epidemic, views of
AIDS
have often taken two diametrically opposite perspectives -- the highly
personalized form of individual stories and memoirs and works of art versus the
highly impersonal form of charts and graphs and statistical tables. But are
there other ways to attempt to come to grips with the incredible magnitude of
the worldwide scope of AIDS, other means of trying to understand the vast
numbers involved? Consider the possibility below, one that many Americans can
relate to.
In a literal sense, numbers in the millions are
beyond human experience or comprehension. But so, too, are numbers even in the
tens of thousands. Still, when the number of
AIDS
deaths in the U.S. hit the 60,000 mark, over a decade ago, a new statistic began
to be widely circulated. The epidemic had at that point claimed more Americans
than the Vietnam War.
This statistic might seem, on its surface, a bit
of a strange -- or perhaps strained -- comparison. What, after all, did U.S.
military casualties in a Southeast Asian civil war really have to do with
civilian deaths from an immune deficiency. Conservative pundits were,
unsurprisingly, quick to dismiss the figure as meaningless.
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The geography of AIDS: While the epidemic is global -- "pandemic" in technical
terms -- there are major regional variations. |
But many others understood why this was a
powerful comparison. First, the death toll of the sixteen-year-long Vietnam War
had been deeply etched into the public consciousness as the collective trauma of
a nation. Even more importantly, though, evoking the number of deaths in Vietnam
was also one way to help people comprehend the scope of mortality figures --
60,000 individual lives -- that had scaled too high for anyone to meaningfully
grasp, except perhaps in the purely abstract.
American deaths in Vietnam became etched in
stone, literally, with the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial on
the National Mall in Washington DC, which is today the most visited in the
country. Nearly two decades after its dedication, the memorial retains its
power.
The monument itself is simple: two sheer
247-foot-long walls of black granite meeting at a right angle. The viewer starts
walking alongside a low wall only a few feet off the ground inscribed with a
handful of names, then walks step after step after step as the wall grows in
height and encompasses more and more names -- first hundreds, then thousands,
then tens of thousands of deaths.
At the vertex of the two walls, the memorial
stretches to more than ten feet high, towering over the viewer. And at that
point, the list of names seems to go on forever in either direction. If the
viewer still has not grasped the exact dimensions of 58,209 deaths, their sheer
magnitude, at least, becomes inescapable.
Now, consider that in the U.S. the cumulative
number of AIDS deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
by the end of 1998 was 410,900 -- or the equivalent of over seven Vietnam
memorials, a wall which would stretch on for two-thirds of a mile.
And now, consider that AIDS deaths in the U.S.
account for only about five percent of the world's totals. A comparable memorial
for global AIDS deaths would consist of over 13,900,000 names and would require
238 Vietnam memorials, about 22 miles of wall.
Yet even the number of AIDS deaths to date pales
before United Nations estimates of the number of those now
living with HIV/AIDS:
33.4 million people. This figure would require nearly 574 additional Vietnam
memorials and about another 54 miles of wall.
Thus, in all, a memorial commemorating all those
who have had
HIV, living or deceased, would require a total of 842 Vietnam memorials or
76 miles of wall. Reading all the names aloud, at one a second, day and night,
would take over six weeks.
Such are the basic contours of the global
HIV/AIDS epidemic at the start of the twenty-first century. Still, 76 miles
of wall is far beyond what the eye can take in, and it would take days to visit
842 Vietnam Memorials. And with 5.6 million people worldwide newly infected with
HIV in 1999, some ninety new memorials and nine more miles of wall would have to
be built annually. When our rational ability to comprehend numbers fail us, we
have no choice but to turn to metaphors and imagery. Yet what does it tell us
if, even in the metaphorical realm, the global
AIDS
epidemic has become too huge to grasp?
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