Putting A Plague In Perspective

Bush’s long-term proposal towards the AIDS epidemic has been to request 30 billion dollars over the next five years for prevention, treatment, and care. A worthy goal and a critical step, it would seem. But criticism of the plan has been forthcoming — and it’s come from some unusual sources. Daniel Halperin, an HIV/AIDS specialist at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues in the NYT yesterday that the intense focus on AIDS has a major downside: it has resulted in the neglect of other, very preventible diseases. Even the current $15 billion that is currently being allocated towards AIDS, suggests Halperin, is “an unprecedented amount of money aimed mainly at a single disease.”

Meanwhile, many other public health needs in developing countries are being ignored. The fact is, spending $50 billion or more on foreign health assistance does make sense, but only if it is not limited to H.I.V.-AIDS programs.

…As the United States Agency for International Development’s H.I.V. prevention adviser in southern Africa in 2005 and 2006, I visited villages in poor countries like Lesotho, where clinics could not afford to stock basic medicines but often maintained an inventory of expensive AIDS drugs and sophisticated monitoring equipment for their H.I.V. patients. H.I.V.-infected children are offered exemplary treatment, while children suffering from much simpler-to-treat diseases are left untreated, sometimes to die.

Halperin ends with an important question: “With 10 million children and a half million mothers in developing countries dying annually of largely preventable conditions, should we mutiply AIDS spending while giving only a pittance for initiatives like safe-water projects?”