Pay more attention to silent killers

Health activists Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) claimed last week that the global recession threatens Aids funding, putting millions of lives in Africa at risk.

Donors certainly have to think more carefully about getting the biggest bang for their buck but this is long overdue.

For too long, global health funding has gone to diseases like Aids with the most vocal lobby groups and not to the diseases with the greatest need.

HIV/Aids is the world’s most high profile disease. “World Aids Day” garners an astonishing 32.3m hits on Google.

According to a 2007 poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, people questioned in eight out of 10 sub-Saharan African countries consider Aids to be their country’s number one health priority.

The same poll shows people in Asia also believe HIV should be a major priority for their governments, with those in India and Bangladesh putting it at the top.

In fact, HIV/Aids causes only 5.7 per cent of deaths in developing countries.

Eight countries do have a severe Aids crisis, all in sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe), hence the misperception among their neighbours.

The prevalence in South Africa is a massive 18.1 per cent but in India prevalence is a tiny 0.3 per cent and in Bangladesh it is too small to calculate.

In Kenya it is around eight per cent but new infections are falling.

That HIV/Aids is at the front of ordinary peoples’ consciousness is a result of decades of campaigning by international activists, perhaps the best organised and most powerful health lobby the world has ever seen.

A staggering 24,000 delegates, many of them professional campaigners, attended 2008’s biannual International Aids conference in Mexico City — and that’s just the ones who could afford the airfare and the $1,200 entry fee.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of Aids NGOs have sprung, producing a constant stream of publicity and advocacy.

Major development pressure groups such as Oxfam and Save the Children have put Aids at the heart of their lobbying.

As a result of this lobbying, the cash has poured in.