HIV/AIDS Policy: Politics of AIDS Control in Uganda Examined

J. Putzel and colleagues at the University of London recently evaluated the political aspects and processes involved in Uganda's fight against its generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic and analyzed the "complexities of presidential action and the relation between action at the level of the state and that taken within societal organizations."

By the mid 1980s, Uganda was experiencing a full-blown HIV/AIDS epidemic, characterized by heterosexual transmission with a long gestation period, affecting people in the prime of their productive lives. These epidemiological characteristics demonstrated the need for far-reaching changes in sexual behavior, including the educational activities to achieve this, in addition to relatively complex disease surveillance and control systems (blood supplies, injection practices, mitigating drug delivery), the report said. "The centralist character of the Museveni regime was critical not only to mobilizing state organizations and foreign aid resources, but also to ensuring significant involvement from non-state associations and religious authorities," the authors noted.

"The Ugandan experience demonstrates that there is a tension between the requirements for systematic action that a strong public authority can deliver and the need to disseminate information requiring a degree of democratic openness," the investigators said. Because "the virus largely ignored the privileges of wealth and political power," Museveni was able to forge a coalition to back an HIV/AIDS campaign. "With the development of antiretroviral therapy and the access that the wealthy can gain to these drugs, this basis for the broadest possible coalition to fight HIV/AIDS may be weakened in the future," the study concluded.

The study, "The Politics of Action on AIDS: A Case Study of Uganda," was published in Public Administration and Development (2004;24(1):19-30).

Back to other news for April 23, 2004