We can end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030
In public health, complacency is more dangerous than the pathogens we are trying to conquer. It creeps in quietly, just as progress starts to look permanent. We think a threat has been contained, a disease defeated, and we turn our attention elsewhere.
But infectious pathogens do not read budget statements or respect borders. They exploit every gap we leave them.
This is why any discussion of curtailing Canada’s contribution to The Global Fund should be a cause for deep concern.
These diseases continue to claim millions of lives each year. This is not a distant matter of foreign aid impacting only those in faraway lands. It is a direct question of our own health security, global stability, and moral leadership.
For more than four decades, my work as a physician, researcher, and educator has kept me at the frontline of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I have witnessed the devastation wrought when illness meets inequity, but also the extraordinary transformation that occurs when evidence-based care reaches those who need it.
Thanks to such innovations, and through sustained funding, we may see the end of AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. That is huge. Science has given us the tools to turn the tide on HIV, TB, and malaria, and The Global Fund is ensuring those tools reach communities worldwide.
The Global Fund is working to end AIDS, TB, and malaria by investing in prevention, treatment, and care programs in over 155 countries.
Today we stand at a pivotal juncture. Despite significant progress — including 70 million lives saved — sustained investment in The Global Fund is essential if we are to overcome emerging challenges and achieve the goal of ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.
The reality is simple: a fully funded Global Fund makes all of us safer. Money spent on infectious disease prevention and control delivers several times its value in avoided treatment costs and crisis response.
A reduction in support to The Global Fund would have swift and far-reaching consequences: rising infections, avoidable deaths, and weakened health and community systems in regions already stretched to their limits.
In an age of global mobility, this is everyone’s problem, whether you are in Victoria, BC or Pretoria, South Africa.
Canada has long prided itself on leading by example in global health, and rightly so. We were among the first to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when stigma and fear were rife. We helped pioneer the model of multilateral funding that now saves millions each year. To cut back now would be a retreat from that tradition of leadership just when collective resolve is most needed.
We have the tools to end AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria as global health threats within a generation. The question is no longer whether we can achieve this, it is whether we have the resolve to see it through.
Canada helped build The Global Fund because we understood that a healthier world makes for a safer world. This truth has not changed. What is at stake now is whether we are astute enough to act upon it.
Dr. Julio Montaner is the executive director and physician-in-chief of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the chair in AIDS Research and head of the Division of AIDS in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and a past-president of the International AIDS Society.
