Not so fast, says Stephen Lewis. Beyond drugs we need social and political cures.
It sounds like very good news. The United Nations announced triumphantly this summer, in the run up to yet another global conference on the disease, that it will be possible to see “the end of AIDS” by 2030.
The U.N. report claims that ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 is possible and would mean the spread of HIV was being controlled or contained. The impact of the virus in societies and in people’s lives will have been reduced by significant declines in ill health, stigma, deaths and the number of AIDS orphans.
According to a July article in the medical journal The Lancet, “in 2013 there were 1.8 million new HIV infections, 29.2 million HIV cases and 1.3 million HIV deaths as opposed to the epidemic’s peak in 2005, when the disease took 1.7 million lives.”
The Lancet also notes that anti-AIDS drugs have saved more than 19 million years of human life since 1990, 70 per cent of them in developing countries.
Tom Sandborn
The Tyee
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