IT would seem that all is not well with the National AIDS Council Secretariat.
Last Thursday, the headquarters in Port Moresby were closed by order of Health Minister Sasa Zibe.
Health Secretary Dr Clement Malau, who has had a long association with AIDS, issued the two-day suspension.
There are rumours of misappropriation of funds.
Doubtless, many of these are just that – rumours without substantiation.
But the Health Minister and his department Secretary are not people likely to act without some conviction in such a matter.
Why do these accusations arise centred on organisations such as the NACS and the National Narcotics Bureau?
It seems that wherever there are funds donated or made available to fight particular social or medical targets, there will be glib and plausible fraudsters masquerading as honest servants of the State.
The acting director of the NACS responded to his suspension and that of six senior officers by lamenting that “proper suspension procedures” were allegedly not followed.
That could almost be described as the traditional excuse; distract public attention from the substance of the accusations and direct it instead towards the methods used to begin an investigation into those accusations.
Then urge all the other officers in the organisation to support its supposed initiative, the battle against HIV/AIDS in the nation.
The facts will eventually emerge.
In the meantime, public attention is drawn away from what matters and that is not the hair-splitting squabbles of the administrators within the council, but the success or otherwise of the work they are supposedly undertaking.
From what we see on the ground, many provincial AIDS councils are staffed by people with a burning dedication to get rid of this disease from our country and do everything in their power to help the often desperate victims.
There is a most unfortunate attitude beginning to grow in PNG; worse, it is growing among doctors, nurses and other medical workers.
Bluntly, it is the beginning of doubt that PNG has anything very much to worry about with HIV/AIDS.
There is no sense of urgency attending the work of this growing band of people; they point to the figures available to health workers and they use these as justification for minimising their own and other’s efforts to contain HIV/AIDS
That is nothing short of tragic.
Yes, the spread of cancer in PNG is a disaster and successive governments have done precious little to address the issue.
Yes, tuberculosis is once again rearing its ugly head in our country and so is its travelling mate, malaria.
In addition, more people are affected by poor nutrition; diabetes and heart disease are both on the rise.
Of course, those diseases must be dealt with and those efforts must attract appropriate funding and expertise.
But that doesn’t give any excuse for turning our back on always-fatal AIDS.
Australia had the reputation of having virtually eradicated the disease partly as a result of brilliant publicity campaigns.
And while the Howard government may not have acted with alacrity, it did at least eventually act and did so in a massive way.
But the Australian public has become too accustomed to the partial success of fighting AIDS in their country; now the figures are rising alarmingly.
The same story is echoed in the USA.
We have absolutely no grounds for such complacency in PNG.
We have only a vague notion of the size of the problem we are facing, and customary figures referring to two infected percent of the population are eventually likely to be proven wildly inaccurate.
The NACS is supposed to be leading the national fight against HIV infection and AIDS-related deaths – not finding itself embroiled in accusations of fiddling with the books.
The NACS money is to be spent on both caring for AIDS patients and boosting anti-HIV awareness.
Instead, we find some provincial hospitals where HIV and AIDS clinic staff prefer to take refuge in a mind-boggling array of red tape, registrations and irrelevant fact-finding before they will dispense so much as one life-preserving anti-retroviral tablet.
Even if any accusations of book fiddling at the NACS prove groundless, the organisation and its staff are both desperately in need of a major shake-up.