Financial Times Letter Highlights Ways Fight Against HIV Led to "Global Scale-Up of Disease Control"

John McArthur, chief executive of Millennium Promise, refutes the argument made in a recent Financial Times opinion piece that "foreign aid funding for AIDS treatment somehow diverted health budgets away from other priorities at great human cost," in a Financial Times letter. "The reality," McArthur writes, "is that the global campaign for AIDS treatment has been the leading edge of a much larger global scale-up of disease control in the past decade." For instance, "[i]n sub-Saharan Africa alone, in addition to nearly 3m people now being on life-saving AIDS treatment, measles deaths have dropped more than 90 percent, more than 180m anti-malaria nets have been distributed in the past three years alone, and child mortality has dropped sharply in several countries, including Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique," McArthur writes. "The successes have motivated entire new global policy movements for tackling maternal mortality, pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases, and other priorities that need similar attention" (10/19).

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