KGOU, 2 May 2014

HIV/AIDS is commonly considered an individual affliction, however Abigail Neely says that HIV/AIDS needs to be considered within the social, cultural, and economic environment of South Africa.

In South Africa, HIV/AIDS is endemic. Neely says that over 30 percent of the population is infected with HIV, however co-infection with tuberculosis is also prevalent.

"[HIV/AIDS] makes it hard for you to fight off infection meaning that you can get all sorts of illnesses" Neely says. "As a result of that, people are contracting tuberculosis in much higher numbers because their immune systems can't fight it off."

Although co-infection is widespread throughout South Africa, Neeley says tuberculosis rates in South Africa among the HIV-negative population are also high.

"We normally think of HIV as this terrible disease that deteriorates people's immune systems and makes them susceptible to all sorts of infections beyond tuberculosis," Neely says. "But there are these infectious diseases that now are much more common even when people are HIV-negative. So trying to think about HIV as having an impact in a much broader way is a lot of what [this] work is trying to think through."

Neely says that the consideration of cultural, economic, and social factors like poverty, poor hygiene, or traditional beliefs in HIV/AIDS treatment was common practice during South African medical care in the 1940s and 1950s but has since been overlooked.

"The government started... a model of social medicine. So the social medicine model was to pay attention to not only what made people sick but it was to pay attention to why these people got sick in the first place," Neely says. "So thinking about poverty education, a lack of knowledge about what makes people sick, poor hygiene, those sorts of questions."

Neely says that a modern day re-contextualizing of South Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic in this holistic framework of social medicine could benefit contemporary efforts to treat the disease.

"I think that sort of logic could really recognize HIV as a broader problem and help intervene in positive and productive ways to make people healthier," Neely says. "There are other ways of understanding health, but when we're talking specifically about HIV/AIDS - its health impacts, its tuberculosis impacts - this model could do wonders for thinking about and treating people."

Abigail Neely is a historical geographer whose research focuses on the relationship between human health, cultural practices, agricultural practices and the mediating effects of culture and government policy. She conducted her research in a rural area of South Africa called Pholela and is currently an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota, and a Resident Fellow at Yale University, where she's working on her book Witchcraft and Wellness: Agency and Change in Twentieth-Century South Africa.

By Nick Aguilera & Suzette Grillot

Source: KGOU