First of all, I'd like to say this is my first post here, and if this isn't in the right category, or anything else like that, please correct me.

So what's everyone's opinions on sending medical aid to fight AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and other common diseases in Africa?

Personally, I have a few opinions on this issue:

The first, is that sending aid to facilitate the people that already have the disease, particularly AIDS, does not help as much as people think it does. Making the people that have AIDS better only allows them to go out, have sex, and make another generation of AIDS infected victims. Wouldn't it be a lot more practical to focus on:

1) Stopping AIDS infected people from having sex and spreading the disease, particularly to their children.

2) Stop the high growth in population (despite the diseases). Sub-Sarahan Africa, to my knowledge, populates faster than most areas in the world, yet at the same time, due to their current problems, they are the ones that should be reproducing the least.

The second opinion I have on this issue, is that, despite common opinion, the Africans, for the most part, brought this upon themselves. Sub-Sarahan African countries' governments are a complete failure when it comes to installing a productive economy into their country. This is, in my post, due to their complete and utter denial of both capitalism, communism, and socialism, but instead varying capitalistic views, with at the same time huge restrictions on businesses and labor which completely paralyze their entrepreneurs, and defeat the point of having a capitalistic society in the first place. History proves that as the economy goes up, the standard of living goes up. The reverse is also true.

So, my conclusion from this is that, if we are helping them at all, it should be helping them reorganize their government and legal system to promote their economy, not treating the symptoms of the problem. It's better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish (although teaching his ruins a wonderful business opportunity).

The third opinion is that, even if "we"(being Westerners) should send aid to them, the aid should not come from the federal government of either USA, or any other modernized country. Governments, first of all, are responsible for their taxpayers, not for the citizens of another country. Second of all, they do not have the right to take the taxpayers money and give it away as gifts to other countries. Third of all, governments are amazingly inefficient with their money, and the Africans would get more aid, and for less cost to us, if the public instead of the government sent it to them.