First a quick update and observation. Last week I wrote about the U.S. pledging $20 million to the Global Partnership for Education at their first-ever replenishment conference. Last Saturday during the monthly RESULTS national conference call I learned something interesting about the conference. Developed countries pledged $1.5 billion for international education, while developing countries pledged $2 billion of their own domestic resources to developing their education systems. At a time when the U.S. (and I assume other developed nations) are cutting funding for their own education programs, the less developed countries are devoting more of their own funding to educating their children.
What that means is open to interpretation. I’ve discovered that what facts mean is now like, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder.
Okay, on to the topic for today. With the completion of the GPE conference RESULTS volunteers in U.S. groups focused on global issues are turning from international education to international health. World AIDS Day is December 1 and provides a “hook” on which to hang the daily death toll of over 6,400 from the HIV/AIDS-TB pandemic . Wait–over 6,400 people die each day from AIDS and TB? Yep.
Each year AIDS kills an estimated two million and weakens the immune system of another 350,000 enough for tuberculosis to end their lives. [As an aside–when I first began researching for this post, I understood that one million people with HIV/AIDS die from TB on a yearly basis. There’s a big difference between 350,000 and 1,000,000. I wonder if (1) the incremental ramping up of funding for AIDS and TB treatment programs have begun significantly reducing the number of people dying and (2) how accurate are the 350,000 and 1,000,000 numbers? What’s changed to cause the big decrease in the last couple years?] Since AIDS primarily kills working age adults, their deaths add another 6,400 voids a day in the fabrics of families, businesses, and nations.
About 66% of world AIDS deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The effects are myriad and include millions of children left orphaned; the deaths of nurses, doctors, and teachers leaving health and education systems over-strained; missing workers to tend crops resulting in food shortages; and absenteeism and health care costs increases reducing company productivity and profits.
New research mostly financed by the U.S., however, helps dispel the doom and gloom by identifying strategies in three areas of AIDS treatment and prevention can not only slow the epidemic but reverse it. Researchers estimate that if adequately funded, the treatment strategies could end the epidemic within 10 years.
On November 8, 2011 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she listed the three areas:
- Ending mother-to-child transmission of HIV
- Expanding voluntary medical male circumcision
- Scaling up treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS.
She reported that maternal treatments now reduce to “one in seven new infections occurs when a mother passes the virus to her child” and added that additional funding of such programs could bring the number of HIV infections caused by mother-to-child transmission to zero.
In the area of male circumcision, she reported that “In the past few years, research has proven that this low-cost procedure reduces the risk of female-to-male transmission by more than 60 percent, and that the benefit is life-long.”
Finally, she announced the findings of a study by the New England Journal of Medicine which discovered that early treatment of an HIV-infected patient reduced the transmission rate of HIV to uninfected partners by 96%.
Michael Gerson of the Washington Post wrote an op-ed in which he echoed Secretary Clinton’s statements to a wider audience and summarized some of her main points.
The idea that the AIDS epidemic could essentially be eliminated within 10 years is astounding to me. We now have the knowledge to end this scourge. What I hope we (as citizens of all nations) have is the political will to force our governments to fund a world-wide “shock and awe” campaign using these treatments.
From 2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991, the U.S. led the Persian Gulf War to free Kuwait from Iraq. According to Wikipedia’s Gulf War entry, “The cost of the war to the United States was calculated by the United States Congress to be $61.1 billion. About $52 billion of that amount was paid by different countries around the world: $36 billion by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf; $16 billion by Germany and Japan.”
So, over $61.1 billion was paid by various countries to free Kuwait from Iraq and stabilize world oil supplies. By comparison, according to Simeon Bennett’s article “Ending AIDS Starts at $6 Billion as Donors Pull Back” in Bloomberg, “Funding for AIDS in poorer nations fell 10 percent to $6.9 billion in 2010 from 2009 levels, according to the UN.”
While comparing the two is a bit like comparing apples to apple carts, the comparison does show that governments can allocate large amounts of funding to goals they deem worthy and can reduce funding for goals they presumably deem less worthy.
So what’s it worth to save millions of children from being orphaned? To build up health care and education systems so they are equal to the need? To keep workers alive and healthy enough to feed those who are now hungry? To have employees fill jobs for business?
Is it worth sacrificing a night watching TV with your spouse to write a blog entry? Is it worth writing a letter to the editor of a paper to help spread news of the recent discoveries? Is it worth communicating by e-mail or phone call to elected officials to tell them of your support for ending AIDS?
What do you think?