If you’ve been keeping an eye on Brazil, they’ve not only been making headlines, you know they’ve also been looking out for their own. Brazil has instituted an HIV and AIDS prevention program which has defied all odds and become a definitive success.

In truth, there’s nothing fancy here – ubiquitous needle-exchange programs and condoms by the truckload, and they also took another stand, this one aggressive. Brazil feels that AIDS medicine is the right of all HIV-positive Brazilians, independent of their ability to pay.

Cutting their 1990 HIV rate to about one-half of one percent of the population and keeping it there, their program is being studied by nations everywhere. And from one perspective, you might say that Brazil had to overcome only two major obstacles: The United States government and the major pharmaceutical companies.

First of all, Brazil has rejected $40 million in HIV prevention funding from the United States Agency for International Development. There is one very simple reason: By congressional caveat, any country receiving this funding must officially condemn prostitution and spread the word that abstinence is the best defense. But Brazil is a country where prostitution is arguably legal – since it’s not illegal. Their highly-effective prevention program accepts prostitution as a fact of life, and believes that the technology of the condom – coupled with education – demonstrably outstrips abstinence.

Likewise, Brazil took on Big Pharma. They basically said, “Sell us the drugs on a sliding scale, or we’ll ignore your patents and make the medicine ourselves.”

In the first case, Brazil rejected the US moral position without compromising the health of its citizens. And in the second case, they rejected the global economics of drug companies to get the drugs to those in need. Brazil felt it had a moral imperative to get drug technology to its HIV-positive population. And if they hadn’t? Fewer people would get the drugs, and infection rates would rise.

This technology of condoms, clean needles and HIV drugs – like all technology – works the same for every human, blind to morals or economic circumstance.

National, community and individual morals have historically been at odds. Yet, everyone is studying what Brazil is doing, because results are results are results. With Brazil’s policy, are there more prostitutes? Perhaps. Are there more intravenous drug users? Perhaps. But there is no doubt there are far fewer families torn asunder, far fewer babies born HIV-positive, far less human suffering as a result of this horrific virus.

I was looking around for some way to make sense of all this, and I remembered Sister Paulus in high school. She kept asking the question: “Is morality relative?” The answer was no. And yes. She would pose situations ripe with moral dilemma. It was an intellectual process at the time, but now I have lived long enough to know there are no simple answers for anything this troubling.

I see prostitution as victimizing women, and yet I also know that when a person is disapproved of – when their behavior is disapproved of – they’re apt to reject whatever is offered, whether it’s education or technology. When a person is respected for who they are, and senses that you believe their life – as is – is valuable, without judgment or condemnation, they are open.

I am convinced that this is part of why the Brazilian approach is successful. Brazil believes that its drug addicts, its prostitutes and its savagely poor have a right to life. And that just may be the most important moral value of all.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.