“Literally out of control” is how Dr. James Orbinksi described the global HIV/AIDS epidemic last Wednesday. Speaking at Hart House on World AIDS Day Orbinski said that 20 million people have already died from the disease, and 42 million people, a larger population than that of Canada, are currently suffering from it. And the pandemic shows few signs of slowing down: Last year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, 3 million people contracted HIV/AIDS. It is the worst health disaster of our time, Orbinski said, probably of all human history.

During his speech, Orbinski, former head of the Nobel Prize-winning Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), vented his frustration at the spread of the disease.

“HIV is as treatable as diabetes,” he said. If given the proper anti-retroviral drugs, victims of HIV can lead long, relatively normal lives. But because 95% of those infected live in impoverished countries and can’t afford the expensive drugs, Orbinski said, they “haven’t got a hope in hell of living a long, happy life.” Many die simply because they are poor.

Orbinski believes that lack of access to anti-retroviral drugs, which are made in the West by private pharmaceutical corporations, is the result of a “profound…political failure” caused by “the intransigence of governments like Canada, South Africa, and the World Trade Organization and the United Nations.”

Orbinski said that the developed world has created a global environment in which economics, not humanitarian values, decide the fate of millions. The prevailing economic ideology “attempts to place society in the market,” Orbinski said, “and the challenge is to completely reverse that so the market serves the needs of society, not the other way around.”

On an evening when many wear red ribbons that are soon discarded, Orbinski said effective action must replace empty gestures and hollow rhetoric.

“The willingness of people and governments to act has been sanitized,” he said. “HIV/AIDS has become just a humanitarian cause. [In order to create real solutions] we have to move beyond the simplistic goodness and the moral righteousness of compassion and charity.”

Orbinski also put the onus on students in the audience to affect positive change. “There are a number of initiatives here at U of T that I would encourage people to get involved in.”

One such initiative is Students Against Global AIDS (www.treatthepeople.com), which has just opened a chapter on campus. Melanie Campbell, president of SAGA at U of T, also spoke at the event and urged students to lend their support in order to ensure that “medicines developed here [at Canadian universities] reach those who can’t afford it.”

She pointed out that in the past, students at other universities have had a dramatic effect on the struggle against AIDS. In 2001, Yale University and Bristol-Meyers, which collaborate to produce AIDS drugs, reduced the cost of their drugs for the developing world from $1600 to just $55 per year after coming under pressure from students, alumni, and faculty members.

Orbinski exhorted students at U of T to join the global fight against AIDS.

“Don’t just be passive recipients of knowledge,” he urged. “Don’t be passive human beings.”