The drugs that can keep people alive once cost an astronomic $20,000 per person per year. Now they cost as little as $200, or just over £100 – thanks to tireless activism by people all round the world.
An extra year alive for less than the price of a pair of Nike Air Max. Bargain. If you live on less than a dollar a day, of course, there’s still no way you could afford $200 per year; but surely for the governments of rich countries – our governments – that’s doable, isn’t it?
Well, isn’t it? Apparently not. The indisputable fact remains: we’re not defeating HIV. Not even close.
The vast, vast majority of people who need antiretroviral drugs can’t get them. So, let’s make our governments’ excuses for them, just for a minute.
We're not beating HIV - not even close
UNAIDS estimates that there is a gap of at least $18 billion between the resources needed to deal with HIV – to address treatment and care and infrastructure and training, the whole package – and those that have actually been made available.
However, as UNAIDS puts it, ‘this is likely to be a significant underestimate.’ By 2008, it reckons, some $22 billion a year will be needed to combat AIDS successfully.
Shortchanged
We’ve fallen a long way short. These are big numbers. It’s no wonder rich countries can’t find the cash.
Er, hang on.
The American government paid $26.6 billion to just one of its defence contractors (Lockheed) in 2006.
The US alone has spent – or plans to spend – $435 billion in Iraq since the conflict began in 2003. That is more money than it would cost (at the estimated 2008 figure) to fight AIDS, successfully, for 20 years. Drugs, treatment, infrastructure, doctors’ salaries, all of it.
The British government has spent £4.5 billion – $8.4 billion – in Iraq and Afghanistan. More money than would be required to buy drugs for every single HIV-positive person in the entire world for a whole year.
The US defence budget for 2007 was more than $530 billion – enough to pay the 2006 shortfall in funds needed to tackle HIV 30 times over, with much more than pennies to spare.
Getting our money's worth?
Not to labour the point, but our leaders seem far more willing to spend money on instruments of violence than to help people dying of AIDS.
It’s not just bombs and guns, though.
A survey by UK credit card company Mint throws some light on our personal spending habits. In 2004, the UK population spent:
£35.4 billion on clothes – $66.6 billion, or three years’ worth of a totally effective response to HIV covering the entire globe
$123 billion on eating out
$29.3 billion on tobacco.
And, just to round it off, we spent $25.9 billion – more than what’s needed to keep HIV completely in check for over a year – on ‘lifestyle services’. And what’s a lifestyle service when it’s at home? Here are a few examples: legal fees, estate agents, private detectives and dating agencies.
Nobody’s begrudging anyone the cost of a dating agency. But it’s clear we – we, the rich world as a whole, governments and citizens all – need to get our priorities in order. The laptop on which I write this article cost me the equivalent of six and a half years’ worth of HIV drugs.
The cost of tackling HIV is nothing compared to military expenditure. It’s nothing compared to what we spend each year in the UK alone on cigarettes. It’s nothing compared to the cost of not tackling HIV.
Letting the chance slip away from us: that’s what we can’t afford.