Wealth and HIV Status Paradox
For higher classes with greater amount of wealth, it is naturally assumed that they will have less of a chance of acquiring infectious diseases because they have the money to stop the spread of such diseases. Meanwhile, lower classes with less wealth will not be able to afford treatments to stop the spread of diseases and might even not be knowledgeable about dangerous diseases that they might be catching, so they are at a higher likelihood of catching and spreading various diseases.
However, this is not the case in Africa with HIV. The upper class, instead, are the ones that have the highest percentage of HIV infection, specifically 15-29 year olds. This creates a type of status paradox, having a "disease of affluence", associated with differing class levels.
Read more about this topic: Status Paradox
Famous quotes containing the words wealth, status and/or paradox:
“What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says: “No, ‘t is no use balloting, for it will not stay; but what you do with the gun will stay so.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly are—knowing because I am one of them—I am still amazed at how one need only say “I work” to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. “I work” has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)