Vatican: The fight against AIDS requires drugs but also instilling a sense of responsibility

Vatican City – In the fight against AIDS, various therapies must be extended to “all peoples and all the parts of a population”. At the same time, people must be based on what the Church asks for, namely “a lifestyle that privileges abstinence, conjugal faithfulness and the rejection of sexual promiscuity”, all of which “forms a part of the question of the ‘integral development’ to which people and communities have a right,” the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers said in a statement issued on World AIDS Day.

Despite medical progress, AIDS continues to cause deaths “that are no longer justifiable, just as the pain of the relatives of the people involved, the impoverishment of their family units, the increase in their marginalisation, and the malaise of children who have become orphans, often at a very early age, can no longer be justified. By now the transmission of the infection from mothers to their children, who often become its victims even before they begin to see the outlines of the world that surrounds them, equally, cannot be justified.”

According to the Council, World AIDS Day of 2011 “must constitute a new opportunity to promote universal access to therapies for those who are infected, the prevention of transmission from mother child, and education in lifestyles that involve, as well, an approach that is truly correct and responsible as regards sexuality. In addition, this is a privileged moment to re-launch the fight against social prejudice and to reaffirm the need for moral, spiritual and – as far as this is possible – material proximity to those who have contracted the infection and to their family relatives.”

“In launching this new appeal for commitment and solidarity in favour of all the (both direct and indirect) victims of HIV/AIDS, we would like to thank, in union of spirit with the Holy Father, all those who have striven, often for very many years, to help them. We are referring here to institutions, agencies and volunteers who ‘work in the sector of health care and especially of AIDS’ and who engage in ‘wonderful and important work’, and who, without doubt, deserve the operational support, and support without ideological ties, of international organisations and benefactors.”

Finally, the message expresses “proximity to people afflicted by HIV/AIDS, to those who are near to them, and to all those health-care workers who, being exposed to the risk of infection as well, provide all possible care to them, respecting their personalities and their dignity.”