I read more than one article yesterday that claimed the attention given to AIDS and HIV virus was unnecessary and misguided drawing funding and skilled researchers away from other more dangerous diseases. Notoriety, fear and celebrity bias lures money and talent to research on Aids, the attention hog who gorges on all the support while starving out other needy diseases.   

Aids they say is under control and no longer a threat outside of Africa. 

Well pardon me if I’m skeptical about the degree to which AIDS or any disease that has not been eradicated is under control. In my lifetime Tuberculosis was considered a weakened threat completely contained and unknown outside of small groups of street alcoholics and marginalized people. Funding for the treatment and prevention of the disease was slashed and now it has returned with a vengeance in new and luscious drug resistant forms. Multi-drug resistant TB may very well be the major killer of the twenty-first century.

But more to the point are not Africans people? Don’t their deaths matter? Do Africans live behind an impermeable wall so that the diseases that destroy their lives will never touch out own? Shouldn’t we be concerned about a disease that is killing Africans on a huge scale?

Two years ago I saw a film taken by a friend at a feeding station for AIDS orphans for one African village. The mass of children present was staggering. I thought they had decided to share the food with all the children in the area, but I was wrong; the children I saw were all orphaned by AIDS. Whole families of children lined up for food, families where a twelve year old was the oldest person left alive and was responsible for four or five younger siblings and cousins.  

I saw a girl who looked to be six and could not have been older than eight with a baby strapped on her back. I was told by someone familiar with the program that she was the oldest in her family, after the recent death of her parents. She lived with an uncle who had five of his own children to care for. She was solid and looked well fed in a country where food often equals love, but she did not look happy. I was shocked to see a child so young carrying a baby like an adult and wondered for how long she would look so healthy. These children got a lot of help and love from extended family and neighbors, but they were impoverished and overwhelmed. My community in a wealthy area of a wealthy country would have a hard time caring for so many orphans. I like everyone else had heard of the plight of African orphans but could not believe what it looked like in the flesh. The numbers of children in just one village were horrifying.

The poverty created by that many orphans can only help to spread the disease. How many girls responsible for so many others will turn to prostitution? How many alone and uncared for will even think to protect themselves with condoms? How much will this help to spread the disease into younger and younger age groups? Look at the problems with disorder, and wandering bands of child soldiers, how much will that be exacerbated by huge numbers of orphaned boys. And how much will these child soldiers rape girls, and seek out prostitutes and catching the disease and spreading it to others?

Who is to say in that cauldron of sickness, and poverty new forms of the disease that we are not prepared for will not evolve to the detriment of we who feel so safe?

I understand resentment toward celebrity diseases. It’s hard to watch the attention showered on breast cancer -- the walks, pink ribbons and scarf fund raisers -- when your loved one is dying from melanoma, or lung cancer or Sarcoma. Breast cancer is not the only deadly form of cancer nor is it the only cancer that kills women. 

I know professionals who skew the diagnosis of severely mentally disabled children to resemble Autism as closely as possible so that the child’s schools and parents can get the funding that is only available to children with that diagnosis. It is ridiculously unfair and cruel that a child with Autism will get more paid hours of education, therapy and care than an equally disabled child with a different ailment, because Autism has the attention of administrators and lawmakers.

Some illnesses have captured our collective imagination and are the subject of Time cover stories, newspaper photo essays, made for TV movies, novels, memoirs, and Lifetime specials, while others are ignored and forgotten. That doesn’t mean that those diseases aren’t scourges and shouldn’t be funded as highly as they are, but  those suffering from other ailments want to receive help and care too. One dollar spent on research for one disease only takes from another if we let it. 

The argument goes that far more is spent on AIDS in Africa than is spent on all other health concerns.  But isn't the answer to spend more on other health issues not spend less on AIDS.  Far more children die from Pneumonia than AIDS and so yesterday a researcher claimed that by putting more money into AIDS we show that we don’t care that children die of Pneumonia. That is wrong, we show that we don’t care that children die of Pneumonia when we fail to treat sick children and we don’t fund research in to the prevention and cure of that disease. By funding the care and prevention of AIDS we show that we think it is unacceptable that children and adults die of AIDS which is a different matter entirely.

Let’s care for all sick people and not argue that we should take the medicine out of the mouths of one to give to another.