The cover of this week's Economist caught my eye.
Rather provocatively it asks "The end of AIDS?"
It's a welcome sight to see such a positively framed story on the cover of one of the world's magazines, and the accompanying article is well worth a read.
The answer, it turns out, is no - we won't be able to eradicate the disease until we have a vaccine, and even then, as a chronic syndrome, it will take a generation to stop.
But, that doesn't detract from the amazing story of how the world has responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Inside the magazine, and online, it contains a truly impressive graph, reproduced below.
It shows how AIDS deaths peaked in 2005, and how thanks to the miracle of anti-retro viral drugs, lives are being saved. It's estimated that 5 million lives have been saved so far, and as the Global Fund and others scale up their work, there's even more scope for progress.
Contracting HIV/AIDS as a person in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s was akin to a death sentence, as far too many of my South African friends have witnessed first hand. Today, it's still a life-changing disease, but millions have access to drugs that can transform lives, as the below clip shows.
As the public and politicians ask increasingly blunt questions about the effectiveness of aid, it's to results like these that we need to point.
Aid, invested wisely, works.
Some of the world's poorest countries have no other way of funding the drugs needed to fight HIV/AIDS - or as world leaders ready to gather in London for the GAVI pledging conference, basic vaccines for disease that could save 4 million lives in the next 5 years.
That's why we're committed at the Global Poverty Project to working with others to ensure that our aid budget is spent on things that really work, and which really make a difference in the lives of the world's poor. |
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