Why Blood

Why is Blood:Water Mission concerned with providing Africans with clean, disease-free blood? HIV and AIDS in Africa is quite near an epidemic. [I won't claim full epidemiological status for it, because I haven't studied the data well enough to see explosive growth.] In October 2000, there were an estimated 24MM Africans with HIV—or three times the number of people in New York City. Imagine everyone in NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix. That would be about one in eleven Americans.

I think that, like many, I began to read about AIDS in Africa in 2000 and 2001. I full well remember reading about it when I spent a couple nights in Ralph Wallace’s mother’s apartment in Chicago while she was still snowbirding it down in Florida. She had an old copy of TIME hanging around with a story on the growth of the spread of HIV in Africa.

Anytime you get to the levels of infection that we saw five years ago, that’s just an overwhelming effect on the blood supply. Here in the States, we hear from the Red Cross and other blood-interested organizations when we have shortages here, but we have top-quality screening processes here these days. It’s unthinkable that the USA will see another Ryan White. Given those numbers, though, it’s not unreasonable to assume that there are a large number of Africans at daily risk of acquiring HIV purely because they have blood needs met by a tainted supply.

Look, I know that it’s easy for many Christians to dismiss HIV and AIDS as diseases spread by risky behaviors that we deem socially unacceptable. But RNA virii like HIV don’t give a hot holy damn about unprotected sex or swapping needles or anything else: they just replicate and go on about their infectious ways. [Yeah, RNA can't really care about these things ... that ascribes moral values to small bits of chemicals.] But our neighbors, many of whom are brothers and sisters in Christ, are at risk if they need blood and can’t be ensured that their transfusion will be disease-free. HIV and AIDS transmission is just the scariest threat they face: a plethora of diseases are blood-borne.

But Blood:Water Mission argues, and I agree, that citizens of developed nations can take some of their relative wealth and work to ensure that a basic medical service such as disease-free blood can be a reality for Africans. They’re working to make this happen, and that’s one reason that I’ve chosen to support Blood:Water Mission in Blogathon 2005. If you feel led, please sponsor me or otherwise donate to Blood:Water. I have prizes for my sponsors, but even if you don’t read this until Monday, I’d love it if you could spare a little cash for folks that could need it.

And … let the blogging begin!