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Updated Friday, November 13, 2009 10:12 am TWN, By Philip Stevens, Special to The China Post

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Noise, not need, grabbing health aid dollars

But much of this money has been poorly spent. The AIDS industry boasts about the millions of people on anti-retroviral treatment but almost no progress has been made in actually reducing the numbers infected globally—surely the only true measure of success.

Meanwhile, diseases that kill many more remain in relative obscurity.

The biggest killer in lower-income countries is chest infections such as pneumonia, accounting for 11.2% of all deaths, mainly amongst children under five. There is no U.N. agency for chest infections, almost no dedicated funding and only a sprinkling of NGOs. Bizarrely, the first World Pneumonia Day was on November 2 this year, although this disease has always been a scourge of humanity

The third biggest killer in developing countries, after heart disease, is diarrhoea. This kills 1.5 million children every year, more than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Yet there is no World Diarrhoea Day and the disease attracts a fraction of the funding of HIV/AIDS. There is only one staff member at the World Health Organization working exclusively on childhood diarrhoeal diseases.

Fortunately, thing are beginning to change. The U.N. has started pleading for funds to improve health systems, so that “silent killers” such as pneumonia and diarrhoea can be better tackled. Some government aid agencies, such as Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), plan in future to spend money on improving health care systems, rather than on specific diseases such as AIDS. Better health care systems also make it easier to manage HIV patients, who tend to have other health problems.

The AIDS lobby rejects this reasoning. “Some policymakers say AIDS is expensive, we should focus on cheap and easy things,” MSF's Tido von Schoen-Angerer told reporters last week, adding: “This cannot be an either-or game.(...) It's not that HIV is over-funded. Global health is under-funded.”

The reality is that there will never be enough money for global health. Governments therefore have a duty to ensure that taxpayers' money saves as many lives as possible. Taking the lobbying of the AIDS industry with a pinch of salt would be a good place to start.

Philip Stevens is a Senior Fellow at International Policy Network, a development think-tank based in London.

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