A Message from Stephen Lewis
What I am about to write is difficult, but it’s not meant to be invidious.
In the tragic saga of Ebola, there have been, thus far, more than fifteen thousand cases and more than five thousand deaths. It’s a death rate approximating 35%.
In the ongoing saga of HIV and AIDS, there have been, since the beginning of the pandemic in the early 1980s, 78 million infections and 39 million deaths. That’s an exact death rate of 50%.
If people feel that the comparison is unfair — that my reference to HIV and AIDS covers too much time — then let’s look at the most recent period for which HIV data is available. In 2013, UNAIDS reports that there were 2.1 million new infections and 1.5 million deaths.
Under no circumstances can one depreciate Ebola. It is a terrifying, hideous infectious disease that causes death and panic in equal measure. It’s now also responsible for the evisceration, perhaps fatally, of three countries in West Africa. No less a person than the President of the World Bank has said that Ebola may have devastated the economies and social structures of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea for a generation or more.
Commensurate with the Ebola plague has come the revelation that the health infrastructure in West Africa fundamentally doesn’t exist; that health workers of every occupation are in desperately short supply, that the international community is painfully slow to respond, that the World Health Organization is fatally flawed in both capacity and leadership, that if it wasn’t for an NGO like Doctors Without Borders the death toll would be exponential.
But there’s another consequence, a perfectly understandable consequence.
What marginal international funding there is for humanitarian intervention has gone/is going overwhelmingly to Ebola. How could it be otherwise? However, we must step back for a moment and ask what’s taking a hit as a result.
The answer is HIV and AIDS. You see, the overall amount of money available is still largely the same… it’s just being channeled in a different direction. What should happen is a dramatic enlargement of the financial foreign aid pie. But it’s not happening.
More’s the pity, because the work being done on HIV at grass-roots level is exactly the kind of community-based model that helps a country fight a scourge. Health systems are strengthened and with them, the capacity to intervene and hold things together.
If we lose that now, we’re in trouble on HIV and AIDS. No one — I repeat, no one — should reduce his or her contribution to Ebola. It’s the life and death struggle of the moment.
But even while supporting the fight against Ebola, we ask you not to forget about HIV. You can’t imagine how many governments are doing just that… the constant, repetitive drum-roll that AIDS is over, that AIDS is a thing of the past, that the AIDS-Free generation is upon us; it’s sheer unmitigated nonsense.
Just look at the numbers with which I started this letter.
It’s awkward to write a letter like this. Someone might make the argument that I’m plumping for AIDS over Ebola. That’s simply not the case. I’m trying to lay out the facts as we know them, and hoping against hope that some of you will agree. It’s not to give less to Ebola; it’s a plea that we not forget the Foundation’s stalwart grassroots partners in the process.
Thank you,
Stephen Lewis
Chair of the Board and Co-Founder
Stephen Lewis Foundation
What I am about to write is difficult, but it’s not meant to be invidious.
In the tragic saga of Ebola, there have been, thus far, more than fifteen thousand cases and more than five thousand deaths. It’s a death rate approximating 35%.
In the ongoing saga of HIV and AIDS, there have been, since the beginning of the pandemic in the early 1980s, 78 million infections and 39 million deaths. That’s an exact death rate of 50%.
If people feel that the comparison is unfair — that my reference to HIV and AIDS covers too much time — then let’s look at the most recent period for which HIV data is available. In 2013, UNAIDS reports that there were 2.1 million new infections and 1.5 million deaths.
Under no circumstances can one depreciate Ebola. It is a terrifying, hideous infectious disease that causes death and panic in equal measure. It’s now also responsible for the evisceration, perhaps fatally, of three countries in West Africa. No less a person than the President of the World Bank has said that Ebola may have devastated the economies and social structures of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea for a generation or more.
Commensurate with the Ebola plague has come the revelation that the health infrastructure in West Africa fundamentally doesn’t exist; that health workers of every occupation are in desperately short supply, that the international community is painfully slow to respond, that the World Health Organization is fatally flawed in both capacity and leadership, that if it wasn’t for an NGO like Doctors Without Borders the death toll would be exponential.
But there’s another consequence, a perfectly understandable consequence.
What marginal international funding there is for humanitarian intervention has gone/is going overwhelmingly to Ebola. How could it be otherwise? However, we must step back for a moment and ask what’s taking a hit as a result.
The answer is HIV and AIDS. You see, the overall amount of money available is still largely the same… it’s just being channeled in a different direction. What should happen is a dramatic enlargement of the financial foreign aid pie. But it’s not happening.
More’s the pity, because the work being done on HIV at grass-roots level is exactly the kind of community-based model that helps a country fight a scourge. Health systems are strengthened and with them, the capacity to intervene and hold things together.
If we lose that now, we’re in trouble on HIV and AIDS. No one — I repeat, no one — should reduce his or her contribution to Ebola. It’s the life and death struggle of the moment.
But even while supporting the fight against Ebola, we ask you not to forget about HIV. You can’t imagine how many governments are doing just that… the constant, repetitive drum-roll that AIDS is over, that AIDS is a thing of the past, that the AIDS-Free generation is upon us; it’s sheer unmitigated nonsense.
Just look at the numbers with which I started this letter.
It’s awkward to write a letter like this. Someone might make the argument that I’m plumping for AIDS over Ebola. That’s simply not the case. I’m trying to lay out the facts as we know them, and hoping against hope that some of you will agree. It’s not to give less to Ebola; it’s a plea that we not forget the Foundation’s stalwart grassroots partners in the process.
Thank you,
Stephen Lewis
Chair of the Board and Co-Founder
Stephen Lewis Foundation