"It is no longer heresy to point out that far too much is spent on HIV relative to other needs and that this is damaging health systems...
HIV aid often exceeds total domestic health budgets themselves, including their HIV spending. It has created parallel financing, employment, and organisational structures, weakening national health systems at a crucial time and sidelining needed structural reform...
UNAIDS is out of touch with reality, and its single issue advocacy is harming health systems and diverting resources from more effective interventions against other diseases...
Steadily, the demand is increasing for better healthcare systems, not funding for HIV. Mozambique’s health minister stated: "The reality in many countries is that funds are not needed specifically for AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria. Funds are firstly and mostly needed to strengthen national health systems so that a range of diseases and health conditions can be managed effectively."..
Guyana’s national health sector strategy notes the need "to convince our development partners (who support us with external aid) that some of the money they provide us with should no longer be earmarked for their favourite diseases, mainly HIV, but must be spent to improve our general health services so that we can handle all diseases better and according to our actual disease priorities."...
HIV exceptionalism is dead—and the writing is on the wall for UNAIDS. Why a UN agency for HIV and not for pneumonia or diabetes, which both kill more people?"
From an article by Roger England in the British Medical Journal.
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