NotAIDS! News
January 29, 2007

Clean drinking water, a luxury most of us take for granted, is sadly unavailable for a billion or so of our brothers and sisters around the world.

NotAIDS! has published various charts and editorials about the shameful lack of attention to the world's most solvable health problems.

Having enough food to eat isn't a question for most people of the West, many of whom are overweight, and a frightening majority of whom are obese.

But in developing nations, and amongst the lower income in the cities and towns of the rich West, malnutrition is shockingly common.

In a surprising shift towards common sense, some important voices are joining the call to correct these gross imbalances.

The Associated Press recently published an article by Maria Cheng, "Experts Call for Rethinking AIDS Money." She quotes some of the statistics NotAIDS! has graphically represented over the past two years, data which has been available for some time, but for some reason until now hasn't been sexy enough for the likes of celebrity ambassadors such as the always-sunglassed Bono.

As the charts show, easily curable conditions cause the most premature deaths, like parasites in untreated drinking water, or malnutrition.

Dr. Richard Horton, editor of Lancet, a British medical journal, had this to say, "We have a system in public health where the loudest voice gets the most money. AIDS has grossly distorted our limited budget."

This evaluation of spending budgets is certain to be uncomfortable to AIDS researchers and the techno-medical-government complex who fatten themselves at the expense of HIV positive guinea pigs and unwitting taxpayers.

In her January 18, 2008 essay, Maria Cheng notes some important points the "Rethinkers" have been discussing for years.

The world invests about $8 billion to $10 billion in AIDS every year, more than 100 times what it spends on water projects in developing countries. Yet more than 2 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation, and about 1 billion lack clean water.

In a recent series in the journal Lancet, experts wrote that more than one-third of child deaths and 11 percent of the total disease burden worldwide are due to mothers and children not getting enough to eat — or not getting enough nutritional food.

"If we look at the data objectively, we are spending too much on AIDS," wrote Dr. Malcolm Potts, an AIDS expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

Even the World Health Organization (WHO), sharply criticized on the pages of NotAIDS! for its propagation of misguided health policies, admits global health funding priorities are screwy.

Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the AIDS department at WHO sheepishly remarks on his work in Kenya. "It did feel a bit peculiar to be investing so much money into anti-retrovirals while the people there were dealing with huge problems like water and sanitation."

As celebrity spokespeople with the best intentions glamorized AIDS funding, less sexy problems like clean water projects, sanitation systems, and food for the billions of our brothers and sisters around the world took backstage.

Ironically, the popularity of the AIDS cause was spurred on by the death of Hollywood actor Rock Hudson, who few know didn't even test HIV positive. Mr. Hudson died just months after quadruple bypass surgery, and whose copious consumption of liquor and 4-packs of cigarettes a day led to his dramatic decline and untimely demise.

Many researchers in the AIDS world like to use the term, "resource poor" when referring to the war-torn, poverty stricken nations ravaged by the imperial colonialism of the last two centuries.

The term couldn't be more inaccurate. The lands of Africa, for example, rich in natural resources and mineral deposits, are pillaged by the corporate interests of the West, whose policies and public discourse, and AIDS work fattens the wallets of pharmaceutical companies, and whose politicians hide the criminal ransacking that continues unabated.

The middle classes of the West are busy trying to maintain a moderate quality of life, taking for granted the faucet in the kitchen, the food in the refrigerator, the weekly trash collection, while the entrenched poverty of billions of our bretheren continues.

While billions go hungry, and billions suffer cholera and dysentery from parasite infested waters collected in street puddles, billions of dollars are poured into the black hole of AIDS research, ultimately landing in the bank accounts of pharmaceutical companies.

But "trying to redirect AIDS money will take a long time," complains Dr. Richard Wamai, a Kenyan doctor at Harvard's School of Public Health. "It's a bit like trying to stop an ocean liner."

"No one is beating the drum for basic health problems," said Daniel Halperin, an AIDS specialist also at Harvard University's School of Public Health.

It's time we listen more carefully.

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