"Romantic" AIDS cause diverts needed funds

Medical care should always be geared to saving and protecting lives. This sentiment brings 25,000 activists together in Mexico City this week for the 17th International Aids Conference. They have helped push the disease to the top of the global agenda, securing unprecedented sums of money –including the US$39 billion recently authorised by the US Congress for the President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief.

But the international attention received by Aids thanks to high profile campaigns from former US presidents such as Bill Clinton and rock stars such as Bono is undermining health systems in Africa and leaving other, equally serious, diseases neglected.

This is what happens when politics and fashion dictate medical priorities.

I constantly witness the politicisation of “romantic” diseases. Celebrities attract attention to certain diseases, causing politicians to divert public money in their direction. Campaigners and aid agencies ride this wave and increase their funds, size and influence.

Our habit of allowing fashion to influence medical priorities is not new. The poets Byron and Shelley positively romanticised disease, and at the end of the 19th century there was a narrow concentration on tuberculosis – though a host of other killer diseases bred by poverty were virtually ignored.

HIV/Aids is arguably the romantic disease of our age. For the last three decades the UN has warned of the threat of a massive, global pandemic, sweeping through entire populations.

This has now been revealed as untrue. Scientists are united in the belief there can be no “pandemic” spread of the disease in heterosexual populations outside sub-Saharan Africa – a fact which the head of HIV/Aids at the World Health Organisation admitted last month.

Far from a remorseless rise, actual new HIV infections have been on the decline for a decade.

According to the UN’s latest, more honest, projection, the estimate of people living with HIV has shrunk from nearly 40 million to 33 million – due to them finally accepting improved calculations, not a drop in real numbers.

Globally, HIV/Aids kills far fewer people than ancient killers such as pneumonia or cholera and newer diseases such as diabetes. Health expert Roger England recently noted in the British Medical Journal that while Aids only causes 3.7 per cent of deaths in low- and middle-income countries, it uses 25 per cent of international health care aid.

Budgetary projections show that by 2016 Aids could consume half of US overseas development aid. UNAids is calling for US$54 billion by 2015, from US$9 billion today.

Such distortion can actually harm public health in poor countries, where millions of people suffer from lower-profile diseases and are prone to health risks such as diarrhoea, dehydration and inhaling smoke from indoor cooking fires.

With health spending so dominated by the Aids industry, resources and people are taken away from other forms of primary care.

Karol Sikora, professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College School of Medicine in London, has advised the British government and the World Health Organization