Media, Money, and Human Rights
David Hudacek | November 30, 2009 | 0 Comments
In the struggle for global health funding — with some pitting AIDS against other diseases — we should remember a line from the movie All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.”
There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between AIDS and other diseases on the world stage. While there is still a long way to go in terms of expanding HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, ongoing media research at the Boston University School of Public Health suggests there might be a great deal that proponents of neglected illnesses — like childhood pneumonia — can learn from the “success” of AIDS.
What makes a disease a “success”?
Over the past quarter century, there have been close to a million news articles about AIDS. The closest competitors for other infectious diseases are malaria and tuberculosis, with nearly 200,000 articles each.
Lower respiratory infections are the leading cause of burden of disease globally (in 2004, 94.5 million DALYs [disability adjusted life years]); more specifically, childhood pneumonia kills 1.8 million children a year and remains the dominant cause of child mortality (20%). Yet there have been just 12,000 news articles about childhood pneumonia in the last 25 years.
When you look at funding, the differences are just as striking. From 1996–2003, HIV/AIDS received nearly half of all funds for infectious diseases in the developing world. Acute respiratory infections (which include childhood pneumonia) received 2.4%. Why?
Maybe it’s the story.