How do AIDS and poverty interact?
Gettysburg College senior Atlang Mompe and economics Prof. Eileen Stillwaggon sought answers in Botswana. Theirs was one of many student-faculty collaborative research projects supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. “I have a passion to help my nation with this problem,” said Mompe, a citizen of Botswana and an undergraduate fellow of Gettysburg College’s Eisenhower Institute. Behavior alone cannot explain HIV infection rates that are up to 25 times higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in wealthy nations, said Stillwaggon, especially when North Americans and Europeans exhibit higher rates of most risky sexual behaviors. “For nearly ten years now, I’ve been looking at the HIV epidemic as we would at any other infectious disease,” said Stillwaggon, author of AIDS and the Ecology of Poverty (Oxford University Press, USA, 2006). “Why do poor people have higher rates of every disease? They live with bad water, poor housing, poor medical care, and no sanitation systems. In some area
