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In releasing "report cards" on three countries' efforts to protect women and girls from HIV and to care for female AIDS sufferers, activists hoped to shame governments. Instead, members of the umbrella group Blueprint for Action on Women and Girls with HIV-AIDS embarrassed only themselves at this week's AIDS summit in Mexico City - displaying a lack of perspective that would be laughable, were it not offensive.

Canadians may be surprised to know that their country was somehow chosen alongside Zimbabwe and Nicaragua for study. They will be even more surprised to learn that, according to the activists, the tyrant Robert Mugabe is doing a better job of protecting women from the disease than our own government.

Never mind that women in Zimbabwe, often too afraid of their sexual partners to insist on condom use, are hundreds of times more likely to be infected with the virus than they are in Canada. Our country's "lack of sex positive rights and sexual rights messaging around HIV" helped earn it a D-, while Zimbabwe scored a B.

Overlook the fact that Canadians enjoy universal health care and treatment, while stratospheric inflation under Mr. Mugabe has rendered Zimbabwean AIDS sufferers unable to afford the antiretroviral drugs that would keep them alive. Canada received a D for diagnosis and treatment, next to Zimbabwe's C-.

Pay no heed to the fact that Canadian AIDS sufferers are generally treated with sympathy and compassion, while a positive HIV test in Zimbabwe often leads to ostracism by a person's family and community. Our "continued criminalization of sex work" and "lack of federal public education campaigns against HIV stigma, sexism and homophobia" earns us yet another D, while labour laws in Zimbabwe merit a congratulatory "well done" and a more respectable C.

It is true that Zimbabwe's efforts to promote behavioural change have helped lower its infection rate more sharply than in some other African countries. And Canada can ill afford to grow complacent, as the disease continues to prey on marginalized populations. But to suggest that the two countries' situations are similar, let alone that Zimbabwe is further ahead, is patently absurd.

AIDS activists have to struggle to remind Westerners that, despite their own countries' relative success in controlling the disease's spread and consequences, it remains a full-blown crisis in sub-Saharan Africa - infecting an estimated 6,000 people each day, leaving millions of children orphaned and decimating economies. In trivializing the plight of Zimbabwean and other African women, activists achieve the opposite.