Posted on 01/18/2008 1:02:26 PM PST by neverdem
AP Medical Writer
In the two decades since AIDS began sweeping the globe, it has often been labeled as the biggest threat to international health.
But with revised numbers downsizing the pandemic - along with an admission that AIDS peaked in the late 1990s - some AIDS experts are now wondering if it might be wise to shift some of the billions of dollars of AIDS money to basic health problems like clean water, family planning or diarrhea.
"If we look at the data objectively, we are spending too much on AIDS," said Dr. Malcolm Potts, an AIDS expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who once worked with prostitutes on the front lines of the epidemic in Ghana.
Problems like malnutrition, pneumonia and malaria kill more children in Africa than AIDS.
"We are programmed to react quickly to small children with AIDS in distress," Potts said. "Unfortunately, we don't have that same reaction when looking at statistics that tell us what we should be spending on."
The world invests about $8 billion to $10 billion in AIDS every year, more than 100 times what it spends on water projects in developing countries. Yet more than 2 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation, and about 1 billion lack clean water.
In a recent series in the journal Lancet, experts wrote that more than one-third of child deaths and 11 percent of the total disease burden worldwide are due to mothers and children not getting enough to eat - or not getting enough nutritional food.
"We have a system in public health where the loudest voice gets the most money," said Dr. Richard Horton, editor of Lancet. "AIDS has grossly distorted our limited budget."
But some AIDS experts argue that cutting back on fighting HIV would be dangerous.
"We cannot let the pendulum swing back to a time when we didn't spend a lot on AIDS," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the AIDS department at the World Health Organization. "We now have millions of people on treatment and we can't just stop that."
Still, De Cock once worked on AIDS projects in Kenya, his office just above a large slum.
"It did feel a bit peculiar to be investing so much money into anti-retrovirals while the people there were dealing with huge problems like water and sanitation," De Cock said.
Part of the issue is advocacy, from celebrity ambassadors to red ribbons.
"No one is beating the drum for basic health problems," said Daniel Halperin, an AIDS expert at Harvard University's School of Public Health.
Aside from southern Africa, most of the continent has relatively low rates of HIV, and much higher rates of easily treatable diseases like diarrhea and respiratory illnesses. Yet much of the money from the West, especially from the United States, goes into AIDS.
Halperin recently wrote a commentary in The New York Times on the imbalance and said he was astounded by the response. Most were positive, he said, with many AIDS experts agreeing it was time to re-examine spending.
Most AIDS officials say the solution is to boost the budget for all of public health.
"Why does the public health budget have to be so limited?" asked Tom Coates, a professor of global AIDS research at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Let's not drag AIDS care and prevention down to the level of every other disease, but let's bring everything else up to the level of AIDS."
That may be wishful thinking.
"At the end of the day, there are limits to how big the public health pie can be," Halperin said.
Since the discovery of anti-retrovirals to fight HIV in the 1990s, AIDS has virtually become a chronic, treatable disease in the West. But the disease has not been conquered so easily in Africa. Not only are the AIDS drugs too expensive for most patients, but major problems in the health system need to be fixed first.
"It's hard to get Western donors to listen," said Dr. Richard Wamai, a Kenyan doctor at Harvard's School of Public Health.
Wamai said that some African health systems are so weak they cannot absorb the donations, and AIDS drugs are sometimes left in warehouses because governments cannot distribute them.
Still, "trying to redirect AIDS money will take a long time," Wamai said. "It's a bit like trying to stop an ocean liner."
I recall them saying we’d all be dead by now.
I was told in a mandatory college lecture in 1989 that by 1994 at least one close family member or personal friend of mine would have died of AIDS.
To my knowledge no one I have ever met has died of AIDS.
I have lived or worked in NYC or Chicago my entire life.
Some jokes write themselves....
People have been saying this for years. More people die of much easier preventable things like malaria, diarrea and other water borne diseases than any other disease.
Simple access to clean water and soap (not to mention extremely basic healthcare) would reduce worldwide death and suffering tenfold.
But those folks don’t have the political clout of the relatively small homosexual gang and their adherents like Senator Kennedy.
Without taking sides on how much money should be spent on what, the problem has always been getting aid of any kind to the people who need it, and past government officials, warlords, and the like.
How to PRevent AIDS:
1. Sit on your butt.
2. Keep your pants on and your zipper up.
3. Don’t do drugs.
Folding@Home - Binding of a Ligand (small molecule drug) to Proteins
CDC Announces Study of Morgellons Disease (& Half-Man-Half-Tree Odd Dermatological Phenomenon)
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
How many lives have been lost while the PC war on AIDS has sucked up most of the money and research?
Liberalism kills!
2. Decades ago, the AIDS lobby believed that the best political strategy to garner rich funding would be to convince middle america that their happy,ruddy-cheeked kids on the football team or cheer-leader squad that they'd get it. Otherwise, the reasoning went, the middle-class is never going to give us Butt Pirates the funding we really need.
So they tried to convince everyone straight that they were (are) at risk. Well, the risk isn't zero, but if you are mostly "normal", you are mostly OK.
Mostly, AIDS victims have implicity CHOSEN to get it, and in a smaller number of twisted cases have *avowedly* chosen to do so.
How to prevent AIDS:
1. Sit on your butt.
2. Keep your pants on and your zipper up.
3. Don’t do drugs.
__________________________________
Simple enough....why throw billions at it when the answer is obvious. Just dump phamplets out of a plane and leave...they’ll figure it out soon enough.
Ah-hah! They finally admit that spending for AIDS far outweighs spending for other diseases. (Something we've realized for a decade or two.) I guess if one of my loved ones has heart disease, it's just a low-level sickness unworthy of celebrity charities.
AIDS money (from government, not private) should go towards cancer and Alzheimer’s/dementia. Toward diseases which are primarily contracted ‘innocently’ where the victim could not easily prevent contracting the disease.
How many people died because DDT was banned?
Estimates put it at nearly 100 million in the past 30 years or so.
Appreciated. Guess that was only figuring in DDT’s use as a pesticide for crops, and not as an anti-malarial agent.
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