[HIV/AIDS in South Africa and Haiti: the failure of epidemic governance and achievement of the MDGs].

Abstract

Since their adoption in 2000 by the United Nations, the Millennium Development Goals set for 2015 appear to have become a part of the policy agenda of all of the member states. Three of these eight objectives deal with health issues. "Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases": this is the formulation of the sixth MDG. Observing that in many countries strongly affected by poverty and inequalities, the epidemic continues to spread, without really reversing at all, and that access to antiretrovirals is possible for only a small proportion of the patient who need them, we consider the problems of global governance in the field of health. Our intention is to explain that the failure to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic may constitute an obstacle to the achievement of the MDGs by 2015. Proposing a comprehensive sociology of HIV/AIDS, this article pays special attention to the dimension of the meaning of the disease, simultaneously as a policy issue, a social construction, and an object of study in the social sciences. Looking at the two countries most affected by the epidemic in Africa and in the Caribbean, we examine the different aspects that have determined the failure of governance and the effects of this failure on the populations concerned. The excessive conflictuality in South Africa and the biopolitics of "let them die" and the fragmentation of the networks involved in the combat in Haiti are considered to have contributed to a crisis in the epidemic's governance. In both cases, the consequences have been expressed by a reduced life expectancy, insufficient access to antiretroviral drugs, reinforcement of the socioeconomic inequalities of health, the production of new pockets of poverty, more fragile household and national economies, an increase in maternal and child mortality ... The failure of the governance of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in countries such as Haiti and South Africa appears to foretell the impossibility of achieving the MDGs by 2015.