AIDS victims 'buried alive' in PNG

[finebydesign]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:17pm

PORT MORESBY (AFP) - Some AIDS victims are being buried alive in Papua New Guinea by relatives who cannot look after them and fear becoming infected themselves, a health worker said Monday.


Margaret Marabe, who spent five months carrying out an AIDS awareness campaign in the remote Southern Highlands of the South Pacific nation, said she had seen five people buried while still breathing.

One was calling out "Mama, Mama" as the soil was shoveled over his head, said Marabe, who works for a volunteer organisation called Igat Hope, Pidgin English for I've Got Hope.

"One of them was my cousin, who was buried alive," she told reporters.

"I said, 'Why are they doing that?' And they said, 'If we let them live, stay in the same house, eat together and use or share utensils, we will contract the disease and we too might die.'"

Villagers had told her it was common for people to bury AIDS victims alive.

Marabe appealed to the government and aid agencies to ensure the HIV/AIDS awareness programme carried out in cities and towns was extended to the rural areas, where ignorance about the disease is widespread.

Women accused of being witches have been tortured and murdered by mobs holding them responsible for the apparently inexplicable deaths of young people stricken by the epidemic, officials and researchers say.

A recent United Nations report said PNG was facing an AIDS catastrophe, accounting for 90 percent of HIV infections in the Oceania region.

HIV diagnoses had risen by around 30 percent a year since 1997, leaving an estimated 60,000 people living with the disease in 2005.


Here.

[AnnaK<3LMIP]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:19pm

What do you even say to an article like that? People keep saying others need to be educated about these things so as to avoid burying people alive. That's difficult to do when not everyone seems to care.

[vmlinnie]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:20pm

Well, I know what my nightmares will be like tonight...

[The Boy From Ohio]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:25pm

WOW so sad!

[DG]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:29pm

"One was calling out "Mama, Mama" as the soil was shoveled over his head"

I simply can't wrap my head around this. At all.

[vmlinnie]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:33pm

That's the bit that really horrified me. Like, how old would that kid be? 10? Less?

[MotorTink]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:33pm

just reading the article gave me goosebumps

[folkyboy]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:41pm

how utterly awful

[Elphaba]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 3:48pm

I am just speechless

[Katecab99]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 4:39pm

I'm sick to my stomach.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 4:41pm

Oh my God. That's absolutely awful.


Unbelievable.

[sweetdisaster]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 4:47pm

Wow. That's absolutely horrible. I can't believe things like this go on in the world

[RockabyeHamlet]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 4:59pm

That is disgusting. What is their reasoning behind burying people alive? Do they view it as an element of punishment or as a health measure? I don't understand. At all.

[ILoveMyDictionary]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 5:14pm

After reading this and the Bill Nye thread, I feel like I'm living in an episode of the twilight zone.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 5:22pm

Civilization, what happened to it?

[mominator]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 5:44pm

There are no words to express just how disturbing this is.

""One was calling out "Mama, Mama" as the soil was shoveled over his head"

I simply can't wrap my head around this. At all."

I am in total agreement with DG on this one, I can't even begin to imagine how a mother would allow this to happen to her own child.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 8/27/07 at 7:35pm

This is horrible! It's hard to imagine this happening to people. I really dont know what to say to this!

[Midoria]

Posted: 8/28/07 at 1:05am

I always wondered why treating people and animals kindly is called humanitarianism. Humans are probably the most cruel creatures on Earth.

[dramaparoxysm23]

Posted: 8/28/07 at 5:24am

...!

I wish I could go over there and do something for these people.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 8/28/07 at 10:41am

Instead of wanting to go over there and help, it would be better to push the pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices of the drugs they need.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/28/07 at 10:51am

I wish I could go over there and "fix" every last one of them.

If they're going to act like desperate animals, really even worse than desperate animals... they should be spayed and neutered.

This is completely indefensible and inexcusable.