Convivendo com a Aids

It has been 25 years since the fi rst AIDS cases were identifi ed in Brazil. Due to the lack of effi cient public health measures to control its transmission, the Brazilian public health, in fact virtually the whole nation, has developed stra-tegies to minimize the impact of this pandemic in the country.To live with AIDS implies the perception that the possibility, in the short or me-dium term, to reach effective control of this disease, just as it could be achieved with smallpox, measles and poliomyelitis, does not exist. It means to acknow-ledge that the disease control process is slow, thus requiring the quali fi cation of capable professionals so that society’s behavioral changes take place in a safe, rational manner, without stereotypes or prejudice. In order to guarantee this, it is necessary that different sectors of society gather data and information on all visible and invisible aspects of attitudes concerning the disease.To form this “database”, the safest and most adequate, yet diffi cult and slow, strategy is to continually qualify highly capable professionals according to the several AIDS control and treatment aspects, so that they are also able to provide knowledge about the determining factors that cause the spread of this disease. The world experience has shown that the determining factors for AIDS spread are peculiar to each society or social group. Thus, there are no universal deter-mining factors, in spite of their being reduced to the dangerous extreme of the relation between sex and drugs.Four years ago, the