Hi Dr. Mansour: I have followed Hamjatta's interesting posts regarding the HIV epidemic in Africa. I also read the NYTimes special on the conference in South Africa that was published in last Sunday's paper. Nevertheless, I am a bit disappointed by your attempt to explain the rapid spread of this pandemic through Islam. You proceed further to state that lashing human beings a hundred times and stoning adulterers to death is a justified solution towards solving this problem. I could hardly disagree more. First, most countries cannot introduce these draconian methods into their current law system. Sharia is not culturally inherent to most countries, particularly African ones. If Islam is the end all solution to this problem, then tell me how polygamy is a positive practice in the ongoing efforts to reduce the growing HIV positive population in Africa? But, back to the pressing issue, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Mandela and Thabo Mbeki that we should focus more on education and the spread of knowledge about this terrible epidemic as opposed to spending tons of money on expensive anti-aids drugs. This, because without proper education about the disease, the introduction of these drugs will be a short term solution and not a long term one. In fact, our next door neighbors, were cited at the conference as one of the countries that has been particularly successful with the educational alternative. Senegal, through the aggressive dispersal of information, has seen her HIV rate drop drastically. On a final note, your proposed solutions to the problem are positive. But you also claimed that we should stop wasting millions on conferences etc. To the contrary, Aids conferences are extremely important. It allows countries to adopt successful strategies that others have used to combat the spread of this disease. I believe that we have made some giant steps towards finding ways to solve this pandemic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------