A Rhetorical Analysis Of AIDS In Africa By Alison Katz

In the article “AIDS in Africa” by Alison Katz, a widely known member of the People’s Health Movement, there is a clear line between what many people think the root problems of AIDS/HIV are and what Katz believes. She makes many strong statements about this and makes her argument very well understood by the audience. She also gives light to why the masses ideas on AIDS/HIV are wrong. There are many comments made by Katz which tell the reader that the majority of people’s ideas about AIDS/HIV are wrong. She states that they think that AIDS/HIV is spread because African people are promiscuous and overall bad people. For example, she writes “The insistence on analyzing this colossal public health catastrophe in terms of individual behavior has correspondingly restricted the response to action at the individual level, usually promotion of safer sex, condom use, and education for prevention. Predictably, the impact of these peripheral efforts has been insignificant” (434). This is showing that so many people think that the main cause of AIDS/HIV spreading is due to African people simply having too much …show more content…
She is saying that the main reason millions of people get affected by AIDS/HIV is due to poverty. For example, she says “The fundamental public health lessons of the past 150 years are known even to lay people. It is well understood that the overall health status of populations and their capacity to fight off infection is related primarily to food, water, sanitation, and housing” (435). This is saying that people get AIDS/HIV primarily due to having small rations of food, a lack of clean water, proper sanitary needs, and poor housing. It also is implying that most people commonly know that these things are needed for people to be healthy, but they somehow do not connect AIDS/HIV with them unless it is directly stated. This is vastly different from what is being said by most other