Confronting AIDS
| Author | Lyn Squire |
| Position | Director of Development Policy in the World Bank |
| Pages | 15-17 |
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If developing countries face up to the realities of AIDS and act quickly, millions of lives can be saved. The three articles on AIDS in this issue look at the epidemic from an economic perspective and outline priorities for developing countries in preventing the spread of HIV and helping people already infected.
Page 15
MORE THAN 11 MILLION people have already died of AIDS. But 2.3 billion people live in developing countries where the disease has not yet spread beyond certain groups at risk. If the governments of these countries, the international community, and nongovernmental organizations act now, countless lives can be saved. And, if the spread of AIDS is contained, the quality of care available to those unfortunate enough to become infected is likely to be better than it would be in the face of a full-blown epidemic, which would overwhelm the health care systems of most developing countries.
[ SEE THE GRAPHIC AT THE ATTACHED PDF ]
A recent World Bank Research Report, Confronting AIDS: Public Priorities in a Global Epidemic, asks how the governments of developing countries should respond to the AIDS epidemic when they face so many other daunting problems. Although the epidemic requires an immediate response, we must bear in mind that using scarce resources to help those suffering from AIDS means that this will reduce the resources available to achieve other important objectives, such as sending children to school, providing safe drinking water, and building roads. In the article entitled "Setting Government Priorities in Preventing HIV/AIDS," Martha Ainsworth describes cost-effective measures governments can take to contain the epidemic. Mead Over's article, "Coping with the Impact of AIDS," focuses on the difficult issue of how societies can alleviate, equitably and compassionately, the suffering caused by the epidemic.
Page 16
As of the end of 1997, 30 million adults-90 percent of them in developing countries-were infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. Given that the mortality rates for other illnesses-tuberculosis, for example -are higher for people infected with HIV, by 2020 HIV/AIDS will be the single largest infectious killer of adults in their prime in the developing world.
[ SEE THE GRAPHIC AT THE ATTACHED PDF ]
These statistics are averages for the developing world...
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