A Berkeley professor accuses UNAids of scaremongering, reports The Guardian:
The numbers of people worldwide with HIV have been inflated and the UN Aids agency has wasted billions of pounds on education aimed at people who are unlikely to become infected, says Professor James Chin, a former senior Aids official with the World Health Organisation. He also accused UNAids of misleading and scaring the public by promoting ‘myths’ about the disease, such as that poorer people are most at risk, and of being guided in its approach by ‘political correctness’ rather than hard evidence.
‘UNAids’s perpetuation of the myth that everyone is at risk of Aids has led to billions wasted on prevention programmes directed at general populations and youth who, outside of sub-Saharan Africa, are at minimal risk of exposure to HIV.’
Chin is apparently not alone.
Writing in the British Medical Journal last month, Dr Roger England, of the Health Systems Workshop in Grenada, said HIV should be downgraded in the fight to improve global healthcare for poorer people. It caused 3.7 per cent of mortality but received 25 per cent of international healthcare aid, he said.
I’m no expert, but I’m mindful of a similar complaint from colleagues in Liberia. There AIDS infection rates are estimated below 2 percent. Through the Gates Foundation and others, the country has more AIDS-specific money than they know how to spend, while other diseases go unfunded. What’s more, the bulk of the AIDS cash is for treatment rather than prevention.
I don’t understand. Why reserve money for a single disease rather than fund a health care system?
I invite readers who know more about these matters to weigh in.
3 Responses
Oops. Of course I meant Hayek and not Hayak, although it’s possible that Salma would also have been prescient on these matters.
I don’t know if I qualify under “readers who know more about these matters”, but isn’t this exactly the kind of problematic outcome that Hayak (or Easterly…or Chambers) would predict? The decision to devote money to HIV/AIDS programs, be it PEPFAR of Bill Gates, is made by powerful people greatly removed from the problem. You throw billions of dollars at “AIDS in Africa” and of course organizations will scramble to get that money.
The flipside, of course, is that if you try, as you suggest, to fund a healthcare system instead of targetting those dollars at something as specific as HIV/AIDS, it’s very difficult to moniter where the money is being spent. And how do you effectively fund a healthcare system in a countries that more generally lack effective governing institutions?
It’s because the AIDS lobby is so strong and well-organised. And it is overblown in many places (E and S Africa being the exceptions, where it is a true emergency).
There is a lot of good work being done on health systems now (the IHP for example), and we could do with more. But the Gates foundation does also recognise this. Perhaps not quite enough, yet.