The AIDS Pandemic

The mesh of poverty and HIV/AIDS is the deadliest combination on the planet, and there's not the slightest possibility of confronting poverty so long as AIDS runs its savage course. To make poverty history requires making AIDS history.

Worldwide, 95% of the 40 million people living with HIV and AIDS live in developing countries. Those countries, already struggling with unjust trade, crippling debt, and ineffective and insufficient aid, have been shellshocked by AIDS. In the US and most of Europe, HIV positive people can access drugs that can keep them alive and healthy for up to twenty years, but the world's poor are dying from AIDS in their millions because they lack access to care and treatment. It is one of the world's most grotesque injustices that HIV in America or Great Britain is a health status, but for the poor in South Africa, it's a death sentence.

In Africa, Asia and elsewhere, HIV positive people are dying because unjust trade, debt repayments and insufficient and ineffective aid have meant they are literally too poor to live. We have already lost 20 million people to the virus, and there are 15 million orphans whose parents have been stolen from them by AIDS. As people die, the epidemic robs communities and regions of their producers, public servants and future leaders. In Zambia, for example, roughly half the teachers trained each year are dying from AIDS.

At the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005, G8 leaders responded courageously to the scale of the AIDS emergency. In pledging AIDS treatment to everyone who requires it by 2010, the G8 have started to restore hope to the 40 million people currently living- and dying- with HIV. This political commitment was one of the defining successes of the summit and it will require concerted international action in the next six months to turn it from an historic pledge to a extraordinary reality.

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