AIDs have been labeled as the biggest threat to international health. Although the AIDS disease has peaked in the 1990’s some speculate fund situation and if they should focus more of the billions of dollars of AIDS money to “basic health problems like clean water, family planning or diarrhea.” Dr. Malcolm Potts, an AIDS expert at the University of California in Berkeley believes that we are spending too much money on AIDS. He says that more children in Africa are dying from malnutrition, pneumonia and malaria than from AIDS. The US spends more than 100 times the funds on AIDS than it spends on clean water in developing countries. One billion lack clean water. One-Third of child deaths are because of hunger or malnutrition. Some AIDS experts argue that reducing the funds would be very dangerous. They argue that there are millions of people with AIDS and they cannot just simply “stop that.” Except for southern Africa many parts have curable disease like diarrhea and respiratory illnesses. These people have to pay out of pocket and may not have the expenses to help their illness while the AIDS victims are able to have medication for free. The president has a five year budget that has been planned to reduce malaria deaths by half in 15 African countries. This budget consists of $1.2 billion. They say that trying to redirect the AIDS funds will make a long time, but many believe it will help save many other lives that may have curable illnesses.
2 comments:
Your information is very good. I think that it is important to think about health problems in developing countries and we are overlooking some of these issues. On the other hand, AIDS is such a big problem in third world countries that its only instinct for people to focus on that instead of the billions of people that are starving.
Great information, seems like a really interesting conflict of what problems will be most benefited by funding. Hopefully in future news there will be some sort of resolution that will help all involved.
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