AIDS funding debate heats up – HIV/AIDS funding now accounts for about half of all health aid
JOHANNESBURG, 26 October 2009 (PlusNews): The billions of donor dollars spent on combating HIV/AIDS in the last decade, often at the expense of other fatal diseases, have done little to strengthen weak national health systems, some global health experts argue.
On the contrary, say others, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has sparked massive increases in international aid for health that have benefited a range of health issues and systems.
The debate over prioritizing HIV/AIDS in global health spending received fresh impetus after recent data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Childrens Fund (UNICEF) highlighted the millions of children’s lives lost to easy-to-treat diseases like diarrhoea.
Worldwide, diarrhoea kills an estimated 1,5 million children under the age of five every year, but receives less than 5 percent of all funding available for disease research and treatment. A WHO diarrhoea specialist noted that huge progress made in the 1980s had stagnated as attention was diverted to AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Meanwhile, funding for HIV/AIDS rose steeply from 5,5 percent of health aid in 1998 to nearly half of it in 2007. This is the conclusion in an analysis published in a special supplement of the journal, AIDS, focusing on the impact of the HIV scale-up on health systems in developing countries. Total funding for health nearly tripled between 1998 and 2007.
An article by Jeremy Shiffman and others at Syracuse University in New York challenges the argument that the focus on HIV/AIDS has generated greater attention and resources for all health issues.
A comparison of donor funding for four major public health issues – HIV/AIDS, health systems strengthening, population and reproductive health, and infectious disease control – found that the amount spent on HIV/AIDS and, to a lesser extent, infectious disease control, grew rapidly from 1998 to 2007, while funding for strengthening health systems, and population and reproductive health, declined steeply.
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