Pacific citizens: Though 50 years ago there was not much contact ...

Pacific Cooperation Foundation: Just as the Asia 2000 Foundation was ...

Tackling Pacific Island problems from within the Parliament: Strategic thinking about ...

The agenda: THEN: Social issues were important ...

Improving partnership: There is a need to revive the Pacific Islands ...

Tackling blindness among Pacific peoples: Tongan public health specialist ...

HIV AIDS - moral and medical solutions: Public health and other policy planners...

Tongan job solution: Managed employment is a Tongan New Zealander's private ...

The new tertiary landscape - what's in it for Pacific peoples?: Education is ...

Making good citizens: In our Pacific region, and elsewhere in the world ...

Involving Pacific peoples in local decisionmaking: The question all New Zealand ...

Tangata Pasifika? Michael Powles, who has worked ...

Endorsing good governance: Former New Zealand career diplomat Gordon Schroff ...

Need not be conflict: Issues in Pacific governance - where one size does not ...

Cooperation wins: Greater regional cooperation on common issues might ...

APEC and PECC: Though New Zealand seeks to be a good international ...

Advocacy on market access: The Pacific Islands Trade and Investment ...

Being Pa'alagi: The Being Pa'alagi programme, in which I looked back ...

Collaboration key to achieving vision: The vision of the Ministry of ...

Talk to all pacific cultures with one voice:
Ethnic Communications

HIV AIDS - moral and medical solutions

Public health and other policy planners also want to prevent HIV AIDS, fearful that it also might become an epidemic.

Dr Finau was part of the then South Pacific Commission – now the Secretariat of the Pacific Community organisation based in Noumea – HIV prevention project.

“ It is not just condomcracy – have sex and wear a condom,” he says, but adds that the church leaders and others are saying: first, don’t have sex. If you have to, use a condom. That approach, he says, is consistent with the Christian background of those countries.

" Then think why people are having sex,” says Dr Finau. “Prostitution, gay partnership and sexuality problems will come up. So if we fix these problems people will do illicit sex less.”

He says this is not new. It is now done with drugs. Discourage the use of drugs, then we treat the problem with legitimate supply of drugs and syringes.
Consider the systemic issues: poverty, morality, and other reasons you are having sex.

Leaders hovering

The Pacific Island leaders are hovering between moral and medical solutions to sex problems; condoms or prayer, says Dr Finau. Pacific Island leaders are hovering; they need to go one way or the other, he says, and apply more innovation in those policies. “Go morality, or confine to condoms and divorce these from individual freedom issues just like taxes.”

Pacific Island nations need to recognise the system’s problem and to choose systematic, not individual, solutions to face prevention challenges, says Dr Finau.

It is better to spend on public health and meeting systemic problems, rather than overspending on hospitals, he says.

Published 3rd qtr, 2003

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