Health experts want less funding for AIDS

It's not often that you hear someone asking for less funding, but health experts say that the great amount of funding for AIDS have left other diseases in Africa ignored.

Hundreds of thousands of people die of malaria or from pregnancy complications on the continent, yet those illnesses receive only a fraction of the funding that AIDS does. In fact, AIDS health aid has more money than many government health budgets.

From the Guardian, writer Alex Duval Smith expands upon the controversial overhaul request.

Top scientists are demanding a controversial overhaul of health spending in Africa, arguing that the billions of pounds targeted at HIV during the past 20 years have led to a neglect of other killer diseases and basic health problems such as diarrhoea.

Developed countries poured $13.2bn (£8.2bn) last year into efforts to combat HIV, chiefly for Africa, up from $480m in 1996. But only eight countries, all in southern Africa, remain in the grip of a severe Aids crisis, while World Health Organisation data show that five of the biggest killers in Africa are illnesses that affect children under the age of five.

Childhood diarrhoea kills an estimated 1.5 million children under five each year worldwide – at least half of them in Africa – although it is easily treatable with zinc tablets that cost little more than $2 each. Diarrhoea received less than 5% of worldwide research and treatment funding last year.

Daniel Halperin, an HIV epidemiology researcher at the Harvard Medical School of Public Health, said: "There has generally been a misalignment from the donors. It is time for a rethink. Many people in the west believe all Africans are impoverished and infected with HIV. Yet the reality is that most countries have stable HIV prevalence of less than 3%. What most people really need are things such as clean water and family planning. Even tuberculosis and malaria get far less money than HIV. In some cases these sectors have inadvertently been hurt by the focus on HIV."

One of Africa's leading health economists, Alan Whiteside, who is director of the Health Economics and HIV/Aids Research Division at the University of KwaZulu Natal, said the flood of donations towards the battle against Aids had also created the conditions for widespread misuse of the funds. Whiteside played a prominent role in bringing the southern African Aids epidemic to the world's attention in the 1990s. He has also advised the United Nations and Aids2031 – an international expert group set up to chart the best route to tackle Aids in advance of the 50th anniversary of the first report of the illness.

"The lure of Aids money has led in some African countries to large-scale corruption," he said, "and the establishment of non-government organisations as an industry. The achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015 depends on us getting our focus on Aids right.