As World AIDS Day is marked on Monday, some experts are growing more outspoken in complaining that AIDS is eating up funding at the expense of more pressing health needs.<\/p>\n
They argue that the world has entered a post-AIDS era in which the disease’s spread has largely been curbed in much of the world, Africa excepted.<\/p>\n
“AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it’s just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies,” said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.<\/p>\n
Roger England of Health Systems Workshop, a think tank based in the Caribbean island of Grenada, goes further. He argues that UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the fight against the disease, has outlived its purpose and should be disbanded.<\/p>\n
“The global HIV industry is too big and out of control. We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake, … too many relatively well paid HIV staff in affected countries, and too many rock stars with AIDS support as a fashion accessory,” he wrote in the British Medical Journal in May.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
AIDS in its day was a dreadfully scary epidemic, and it killed an awful lot of people.\u00a0 It was also a political football, and one of the first examples of systematic politcally-correct groupthink dominating policy on a key issue.\u00a0 AIDS became a politically-correct policy football from the very beginning, costing scads of lives in the process.\u00a0 Case in point; nations that followed the same sorts of rigorous public-health practices that the US had in attacking all sorts of epidemics in the past – like, say, Cuba – and had the political courage (or lack of political opposition, in Cuba’s case) to focus their national policy on the real causes of the epidemic (behavioral vectors like sharing needles and unprotected sex practices) escaped the worst of the epidemic.\u00a0 The US and much of the western world wasted much time on politically-correct diversions; “Anyone <\/em>can catch AIDS”, we were warned throughout the ’80s and ’90s, even as the evidence mounted that straight, non-IV-drug-users who eschewed promiscuity and approached sexuality with a certain amount of prudent, albeit unerotic and less-than-romantic\u00a0clinical due diligence, were actually quite unlikely to be at especial risk.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe reason given was to avoid stigmatizing gays.\u00a0 And gays rightly feared stigmatization; one would be willfully obtuse to say gays haven’t suffered from discrimination.<\/p>\n
But how many lives was that feel-good exercise worth?\u00a0 Because it certainly sacrificed many, and diverted much funding, awareness and effort early in the epidemic’s course.<\/p>\n
The UN bureaucrat who would lose his job if that were universally recognized begs to differ:<\/p>\n
Paul de Lay, a director at UNAIDS, disagrees. It’s valid to question AIDS’ place in the world’s priorities, he says, but insists the turnaround is very recent and it would be wrong to think the epidemic is under control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As with any deadly epidemic, it’s legitimate to avoid complacency.\u00a0 But there’s a real question:\u00a0 does AIDS need to have the same level of global mobilization that it has had, and still has today?<\/p>\n
It’s not a loaded question.\u00a0 I’m genuinely curious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…it was AIDS that was going to reach across all divides – national, affectional, behavioral – and kill us all. Or, y’know, maybe not: As World AIDS Day is marked on Monday, some experts are growing more outspoken in complaining that AIDS is eating up funding at the expense of more pressing health needs. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,61,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-global-warmingcoolingchange","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}