{"id":125,"date":"2006-12-09T12:14:39","date_gmt":"2006-12-09T17:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/2006\/12\/09\/is-aids-diverting-attention-from-"},"modified":"2006-12-11T10:11:47","modified_gmt":"2006-12-11T15:11:47","slug":"is-aids-diverting-attention-from-other-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/2006\/12\/09\/is-aids-diverting-attention-from-other-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Is AIDS diverting attention from other problems?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an increasing refrain that I’ve heard lately. AIDS is sucking the expertise and funding out of other sectors, particularly in health but quite possibly also in other parts of the development agenda. This is the subject of a recent post<\/a> by Jeremy Shiffman at the Center for Global Development. There are other health problems that kill as many if not more people in developing countries. Problems such as infant diarrhea get ignored or short shrift. He notes that:<\/p>\n

Deaths due to HIV\/AIDS, after all, comprised around 5 percent of total mortality in low and middle-income countries as of 2001 according to a recent study in the Lancet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, AIDS is getting more and more of the health and overall foreign assistance budget. Shiffman notes that:<\/p>\n

For instance, over the years 1998 to 2003, as funding for HIV\/AIDS grew from 9 percent to 43 percent of overall U.S. foreign assistance for health and population.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In another piece<\/a>, he gives an example of what this means in countries like Rwanda:<\/p>\n

For instance, with an HIV prevalence of 3.1 %, Rwanda has been allocated US$ 187 million since 2003 exclusively for HIV\/AIDS from three international programmes (the Global Fund, PEPFAR and the World Bank\u2019s Multi-Country AIDS Programme), compared to only US$ 37 million annually in government expenediture on health.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marilyn Waite over at the Princeton AIDS blog<\/a> has raised this point as well and suggests an even darker potential consequence, a country that seeks to boost its AIDS prevalence to get extra cash.<\/p>\n

I want to bring up a new EXTREMELY DISTURBING issue regarding HIV\/AIDS: it has become the new “sexy” topic in the development community. This translates to the following troublesome reasoning (no exaggeration): if we can increase the HIV\/AIDS prevalence rate in Madagascar, we can get billons and billons of US dollars from all sorts of people and organizations, and we can better develop our country (or this country when the statement comes from the expats).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AIDS is drawing the health care talent and funds to the neglect of the broader health mission. Because there has been so little investment in health infrastructure, the long-term challenge of building governance capacity so that countries can take charge of their own health problems is going sadly neglected. Donors need to recognize this sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

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This is an increasing refrain that I’ve heard lately. AIDS is sucking the expertise and funding out of other sectors, particularly in health but quite possibly also in other parts of the development agenda. This is the subject of a recent post by Jeremy Shiffman at the Center for Global Development. There are other health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":710,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-and-policy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}