It is the mark of a civilised nation that it protects the most vulnerable at home and abroad – and that it keeps its promises. The government’s current plan to cut spending on vital work to prevent the spread of Aids in the developing world is therefore of pressing concern.
At some £850m over the next few years, it is obviously still a welcome and significant contribution to the effort to end the Aids pandemic after almost half a century.
However, it is below the £1bn pledged by the previous Conservative administration, and there is talk of the effort being scaled back still further towards the end of the decade.
Such thoughts are doubly depressing because the Global Fund to Fight Aids, one of the major contributors to HIV/Aids programmes around the world, had the ambitious but practical target to end the pandemic by 2030 – approximately half a century after the first cases in humans were reported.
Successive cuts in funding come just at the moment when that goal could and should be met. The timing means that the developed world is snatching defeat from the jaws of a victory that would mean ending the scourge of Aids at long last.
At a time when the United States is turning away from its responsibilities and commitments to the rest of the world, there is all the more reason for Britain and other nations to do the right thing. We cannot make up for the $60bn (£44.5bn) the Trump administration has suddenly and chaotically withdrawn from countries where people still try to live on a few dollars a day – but we can still help where we can.
That is the essence of the case now being made by The Independent to the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, backed by the Elton John Aids Foundation, the National Aids Trust, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and the STOPAids coalition, among others.
In his letter, the editor-in-chief of The Independent, Geordie Greig, urges Sir Keir to keep up the momentum that could soon see a deadly disease effectively vanquished: “Despite being so close to the finishing line, failure to maintain global funding and progress means we could return to the height of the crisis two decades ago, when people were dying en masse and healthcare systems around the world were overwhelmed.”
There is still no “cure” for HIV or Aids, and no vaccine. That research, too, should continue and be funded, for the sake of the whole world – like any communicable disease, it cannot be confined to one continent or region.
But there are also immediately available and familiar effective measures that must continue. These include therapeutic treatments and, more to the point, inexpensive methods of preventing people from catching it in the first place – health education, prophylactics, and testing.
For quite trivial sums, millions of lives can be shielded from individual misery, and whole societies in poorer countries can be saved from collapse. It is the ratio of cost to benefit that is so very formidable in this branch of protective medicine that makes the policies of many rich nations misguided and counterproductive. As with much about overseas aid, particularly in sub-Saharan African economies, the rewards of such investment are incontestable: higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and mass migrations.
It is true that Britain finds itself in an age of stagnant living standards and pressure on public services, as well as emerging external threats. The mood is, as elsewhere in the developed world, more inward-looking, less generous, and selfish, even.
Yet the advanced economies are still incomparably richer than most of the global South, and where we face the same challenges, where the problems and the answers are both international and respected, the case for working together is overwhelming. We have it within our collective power to end the Aids pandemic. We cannot lose the battle now.
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