Rapper Wyclef Jean blasts AIDS research on Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haitian-American Rapper Wyclef Jean on Monday blasted a US study that said AIDS made its way to the United States via Haiti as prejudicial and unjust, a statement said.

"World AIDS Day (December 1) is an opportunity to evoke the progress and challenges that Haiti must confront in order to fight this epidemic, but also the recent news that unjustly targeted our country and showed serious prejudice," he said in a statement released by his foundation, Yele Haiti.

Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, released a report in October that called Haiti the "stepping stone" of AIDS, as it made its way from Africa to becoming a global scourge.

His finding was viewed as providing confirmation of longstanding suspicions among some scientists that the pathogen was imported from Haiti -- the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, with a long history of migration to the United States.

But the rapper often known simply as Wyclef, a 35-year-old Haitian and part of the hip hop trio The Fugees, said such information only sets back the battle against AIDS.

"AIDS is a worldwide illness that does not discriminate. Making Haiti the scapegoat only gets in the way of world progress in AIDS research," said Wyclef, who has been named a goodwill ambassador for his native country.

"Haiti needs the support of the international community to be able to respond effectively to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country and bring its unique response to the global response to the problem," he said.

Haitian authorities say the AIDS rate had fallen to three percent of the population in 2006, compared with 10 percent in the 1990s.

An estimated 40,000 Haitians are infected and around one quarter of those have been placed on anti-retroviral medications through AIDS centers in deeply impoverished Haiti.

Worobey said the deadly virus probably arrived on US shores in about 1969, more than a decade before the full-blown US AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and may have been carried there by a single Haitian immigrant, according to the study.

"Once the virus got to the US, then it just moved explosively around the world," Worobey said.

Source: uk.news.launch.yahoo.com