Japanese Urged to Speak Out on AIDS
By Brian Covert
Staff Writer
Using the popular AIDS slogan that “Silence Equals Death,” a U.S. doctor visiting Osaka Saturday urged Japanese citizens to make their voices heard at various levels on the deadly disease now on the rise in Asia.
Los Angeles-based doctor and well-known AIDS activist Mark Katz, speaking at a “Women and AIDS” symposium organized by the YMCA in Nishi-ku, said the Japanese have a “golden opportunity” to speak out on the issue when the 10th International Conference on AIDS comes to Yokohama in August 1994.
He stopped short of encouraging the kind of disruptive protests held at such conferences in the past, but did advise Japanese citizens on the Yokohama conference: “Be there and do whatever you can to make your voices heard.”
An AIDS specialist with the Kaiser Permanente hospital group and a representative at last year’s global AIDS conference in Berlin, Germany, Katz defended various AIDS protests — such as over lack of funding and medical care — as a healthy venting of frustration.
“We believe that activism has many positive results,” he said. “People with HIV (the AIDS virus) are very angry.”
“I realize that you, as Japanese, may think it’s easy for Americans to be aggressive,” he said, eliciting some laughter from the audience. “But I encourage you to find that part inside of you that can (lead you to) learn and speak out what you feel.”
Katz warned that Asia is fast becoming an AIDS time bomb among regions of the world. In Japan alone, the central government places the number of AIDS patients and HIV carriers at 1,301, though grassroots organizations claim the unofficial number could be up to 10 times higher.
For women, in particular, AIDS has become one of the top causes of death in the U.S. and other countries, said Katz.
He cited an estimated 30,000 cases of women with AIDS in the U.S. and exhorted the Japanese not to make the same mistakes as the U.S. in failing to deal with the issue of women and AIDS until it was too late.
“It took almost 10 years for people in the U.S. to accept that HIV and AIDS occur in women,” he said.
“I encourage you to continue talking and writing (on women and AIDS) till everyone hears that same thing from Japan,” he said.