Blog > News Analyses > World AIDS Summit Warns of Challenges Ahead |
|
The Fourteenth International Conference on AIDS, held in Barcelona, Spain from July 7-12, 2002, warned that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is the greatest threat to global health today. According to figures released at the summit, 60 million people have been infected and 22 million people have died from AIDS since its identification in the 1980s, with a further 68 million people projected to die from the disease by 2020.
Summit participants, including government representatives, non-governmental organizations, youth activists, business groups, and statesmen such as Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, and Bill Clinton, called for more funding, with the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), declaring $10 billion annually a desirable and achievable figure.
Nevertheless, the summit’s funding recommendation was criticized by various interest groups. Developing countries and non-governmental organizations, such as the Catholic Aid Agency (CAFOD), argued for increasing funding levels higher than the $10 billion proposed. They also pointed out that the problem of lack of funding to tackle AIDS is compounded by the UN Global Fund’s failure to distribute any money since its creation in January 2002 in the fight against AIDS, TB, and malaria despite announcing $1.6 billion in grants to 40 developing countries.
Critics also linked fighting HIV/AIDS to other issues. For example, Oxfam argued that developing countries would be able to fund their own prevention, education, and healthcare projects if they were not burdened with huge debt repayments to the developed world.
The World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), meanwhile, noted that well nourished people are better able to survive the disease and that treating people for HIV/AIDS and then having them die of starvation would be a tragedy.
Others said that developing countries would be better served by the elimination of tariff barriers by Western countries and freedom to use WTO provisions on national health emergencies and compulsory licensing of patents to produce cheaper drugs to treat the epidemic.
Indeed, the disease’s links to other issues such as development, productivity, education, and social cohesion were highlighted at the summit. For example, the International Labor Organization (ILO) says that the epidemic undermines both economic and social development by reducing productivity and competitiveness through increased absenteeism, organizational disruption, and loss of skills, resulting in added costs for training new staff as productive workers die.
Productivity and development have also suffered as the disease has affected education, with children removed from school, to nurse family members, work the land or because schools have closed as teachers have died. These problems are particularly acute in Africa, where 28,500,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS, prompting warnings from the UN Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa that the effects of the epidemic “stand to undermine all efforts to promote development” and have created a skills shortage that years of aid and billions of dollars of development work had attempted to overcome.
The disease also disrupts society because of the widespread death it brings. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), for example, estimates more than 20 million children have been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, with this figure expected to rise to 25 million by 2010, with many facing poverty and starvation as a result. Furthermore, an increasing number of children are born HIV-positive as more women are infected and drugs available to reduce transmission to the children are prohibitively expensive.
Similarly, the United Nations Security Council has has highlighted the epidemic’s potential threat to both national and international security, especially in conflict and peacekeeping situations, where the disease can lead to the complete breakdown of society and its regulatory systems. In response, the UN has adopted the UN Initiative on HIV/AIDS and Security, and implemented a two-year plan aimed at protecting vulnerable communities and supporting their regulatory systems, such as the army and police force, to tackle the disease and maintain social stability.
Furthermore, HIV/AIDS not only kills millions of people itself, it also increases the prevalence of other communicable and potentially fatal diseases such as tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. All these diseases are straining healthcare systems in developing countries, leaving impoverished patients to try to pay for their own treatment and stretching the system so far that there is little funding to treat other healthcare problems, resulting in a drop in healthcare standards and a rise in fatalities. This appears to have affected migration as well, with developed countries noting more people seeking to move abroad to gain medical care and some developed nations tightening their immigration rules in response.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic thus has profound implications for globalization, threatening global health, retarding development, damaging productivity, creating new threats to global security, and raising questions over how best to help developing nations deal with the challenge of disease epidemics. The success or failure of multi-agency strategies proposed to deal with the threat of HIV/AIDS will profoundly affect the future for all nations and the global scope of the threat may affect the way health and development issues are viewed in the future. Visit: http://www.csis.org/hivaids/ for more information