Meanwhile, UNAIDS, the agency coor dinating United Nations AIDS activ ities, admitted this week that it has been overestimating the spread of the disease by as much as 15 percent: There are actually 6 million fewer AIDS cases worldwide than it had previously announced.
Furthermore, the number of new infections is some 40 percent less than UNAIDS had claimed.
The agency blamed it all on polling errors, or something like that.
We’d give it the benefit of the doubt – were it not for two factors:
* The UN is a corruption magnet (witness the Oil for Food scandal).
* And AIDS worldwide, as in New York, is a thoroughly politicized affliction.
Ailments such as heart disease and cancer have a much longer history and higher incidence rate, but AIDS’ celebrity spokesmen have long commanded the attention of much of the political class – and drew the lion’s share of research funding.
When it looked as if a full-blown AIDS epidemic would overwhelm much of the undeveloped world, checkbooks everywhere opened up to battle the disease.
In the last decade, global spending on AIDS reached $10 billion a year.
Yet, earlier this year, UNAIDS called for a quadrupling of spending to meet a goal of “universal access” to anti-retroviral drugs by 2010.
The Bush administration quickly proposed a $30 billion effort over a 5-year period to battle AIDS in poor nations – double the previous US commitment.
Imagine the reaction if a politician said that such spending should be reconsidered in light of the new estimates.
Fat chance.
Yes, AIDS is a serious problem.
The actual number afflicted – about 33 million – is tragic.
But, as the truth emerges, it actually makes combating the disease that much more difficult.
Taxpayers – in America and elsewhere – will be rightly skeptical of worldwide UN “experts” who might understandably be confused with former Oil for Food administrators looking for a new gig.
The money then might really start drying up.