Aids? There's big money at stake

The Times newspaper had an article, on June 16th 2008, about now HIV funding and UN support doesn’t look at the real courses of the virus spreading and is more concerned about political correctness than saving lives. It says,

For all the talk of a “global pandemic”, there are two completely separate HIV epidemics in the world. One is in parts of Africa, where HIV is spread by unprotected sex between men and women who have more than one steady partner. Governments - such as Uganda's, with its “zero grazing” approach to fidelity - that recognised the perils of the custom of having concurrent sexual partners confined the epidemic. Most didn't. The result of the neglect is that in some countries up to two in five adults are infected with a fatal virus.

The second epidemic covers the rest of the globe. Nine out of ten humans (and three in ten of those infected with HIV) live in countries where the virus is spread mostly when people buy and sell sex, when they shoot up drugs, and when men have anal sex with lots of other men. Only a minority do these things in any country, but that still adds up to several million people worldwide. We know how to prevent HIV in these populations, and we have known for years that in Asia, the Americas, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, if you do that prevention well, HIV won't spread farther. Even if you don't control HIV in these populations, it won't go all that much farther.

If we don't recognise this, we will never effectively prevent the spread of HIV. But a lot of UN agencies, governments and even Aids activists don't want to recognise it. Governments don't want to because it would mean recognising that if they want to deal with HIV they have to spend money on services for junkies, sex workers and gay men - groups that don't top the popularity stakes with voters. Ironically, they will happily fund treatments for these people with expensive medicines once they do get sick. That is more acceptable to voters than to give cheap condoms and needles to prevent them getting infected in the first place.

The article was by Dr Elizabeth Pisani, an epidemiologist who has worked as a consultant to UNAids and the WHO and is the author of The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids.

Will political correctness be history’s biggest killer? Is this a question we are allowed to ask?