HIV/AIDS

There are an estimated 38.6 million people now living with HIV/AIDS. Its claims over 2 million lives per year and over 500,000 of which are children. The worst of the pandemic can be found in Africa. The drugs that can keep someone alive used to cost $20,000 per year. Now they only cost $200 (£100), largely due to people campaigning for something to be done about it.

So for someone to live for a year with HIV/AIDS it would only cost the price of an ipod nano. If you live on less than a dollar a day however, as do most f the 3rd world, there’s still no way you could afford $200 a year. So can we 'the rich' countries and our governments do even more. The fact is despite the progress we are still not even close to defeating HIV/AIDs.

By 2008, UNAIDS $22 billion a year will be needed to combat AIDS successfully. These seem like big numbers, the task seems too much for even developed governments like the UK and the US pr is it? The US alone has spent, and plans to spend $435 billion in Iraq since the conflict began in 2003. That is more money than it would cost to tackle AIDS successfully for 20 years. The UK defence budget in 2005 was $500 billion – enough to pay the 2006 shortfall in funds needed to tackle HIV 33 times over.

The finger shouldn't be pointed at the government alone though. A survey by UK credit card company Mint throws some light on our personal spending. In 2004, the UK population spent:

• £35.4 billion on clothes – $66.6 billion, three years worth of a totally effective response to HIV covering the entire globe.
• $123 billion on eating out.
• $29.3 billion on tobacco.

The cost of tackling HIV is nothing compared to what we spend each year in the UK alone on cigarettes. I'm not saying that buying clothes or eating out once in a while is wrong, but we are the rich people of the world, 3rd world countries can't afford any of those things at all. it's up to us to think of others and to make sure we are not spending all our money on ourselves. Letting the chance slip away from us; that’s what we can’t afford. (Figs taken from christian-aid.org)

Sexually transmitted HIV is the biggest cause of the disease in Africa. The problem is how do you tackle this. People say it is unrealistic to preach abstinance as not everybody is going to listen to this. Maybe this is why God told us in His Word at the beginning to not have sex before marriage because he knew in 2000AD so many people would die from HIV/AIDS. Now the church is being encouraged to support the use of contraception, but surely this will only ease the symptoms of HIV being sexually transmitted and not actually cure the disease. The only way for HIV to die out is for people to stop having sex outside of marriage. So what do you think is the right thing to do?