By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Sep 15 2002 (IPS)

Portugal is the only European Union (EU) country where AIDS continues to spread in an alarming manner, due to public awareness campaigns that focus only on “marital fidelity” and abstinence, especially on the part of women, complain experts.

The number of people living with HIV, the AIDS virus, in this southern European nation rose from 88 per million inhabitants in 1999 to 104 this year, compared to an EU average of 24 cases per million, according to official figures released early this month.

But the actual number of cases in this country of 10 million could be twice that, according to United Nations experts cited by the daily newspaper Público de Lisboa.

The continued expansion of the disease, which runs counter to the EU trend towards getting the epidemic under control, is largely blamed by experts on unrealistic educational campaigns that underline the need for faithfulness and abstinence, and primarily target women.

Strategies aimed at fighting the epidemic in Portugal “have been based on subjective concepts like morality,” said Ana Filgueiras, coordinator of the anti-AIDS programme of the Community of Portuguese-Language Nations.

“That outlook is based on a Portugal marked by a highly libertine and secular mentality among common citizens, and a provincial and pseudo-pious attitude” on the part of the state, said psychologist Nuno Torres.

In the government, what prevails is “the idea that AIDS is a kind of punishment for whoever fails to practice abstinence” and fidelity, added Torres.

He complained about the “indifference” demonstrated by the governmental Commission for the Fight Against AIDS, according to which “there is no reason for alarm,” despite the rise in the number of people testing positive for HIV.

“When is there reason for alarm? When our infection rate approaches that of Angola or Mozambique?” asked Torres, citing countries where as much as a quarter of the adult population is HIV positive.

He complained that the government commission insists that “the epidemic can be controlled by barriers that prevent the mixing of bodily fluids altogether, and by avoiding sexual promiscuity.”

Filgueiras, meanwhile, said the Catholic Church, “of all religions, is the only one that has contributed to spreading the disease, by insisting on viewing it as a problem that would easily be solved by limiting sex to marriage, with strict observance of marital fidelity.”

What are needed, said Torres, are “systems for providing education and advice on HIV/AIDS at health centres and family planning institutions, as well as juvenile and recreational and sports centres, schools and the armed forces.”

But “all we have are campaigns conceived of by marketing experts, which are useless, because we must communicate with the public in comprehensible terms, convincing them of the need to undergo voluntary HIV exams,” and to stop discriminating against those living with the AIDS virus, he stressed.

There is “an enormous vacuum on the part of the state, which merely advises a prostitute not to prostitute herself, when what it should be doing is persuading her to insist that her clients use condoms,” said Filgueiras.

She suggested programmes targeting specific at-risk groups, with a special focus on young people and immigrants, while “respecting their cultures.”

Many in Portugal insist that “AIDS has spread in Africa because Africans are promiscuous. But the only difference with Portugal is that Africans are frankly and openly polygamous, while the Portuguese are cynical, ‘camouflaged’ polygamists,” said Filgueiras.

If the state “lacks the capacity to hold a dialogue with the public, it must delegate that task to organisations of civil society, which truly reach people,” she added.

The government should “finance programmes carried out by non-governmental organisations, trade unions and student associations,” she argued.

“If Portugal really wanted to take the fight against AIDS seriously, it should not only be viewed as a public health matter, but as a development issue,” said Filgueiras.

That would give the Commission for the Fight Against AIDS, which depends directly on the executive branch, “the political clout necessary for all of the relevant government ministries, not just the health ministry, to commit themselves” to the struggle against the disease.

Within the framework of the campaign against AIDS that Filgueiras is coordinating among the Portuguese-speaking community — Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, Sao Tome and Príncipe and East Timor — Portugal “has much to learn from Brazil, one of the countries in the world that can boast enormous successes in fighting AIDS,” she said.

Excerpt: