The Social Development Review is providing a special focus on the response to HIV/AIDS with this expanded issue. Because the poor and marginalized of the human family are often most vulnerable, we have reports from developing countries. Because the face of AIDS today is increasingly female, we have articles which focus on the dynamics of gender. In spite of the massive challenge and continuing death toll, front line workers are a source of hope and of learning. We have stories from the front of education and prevention. In this SDR we attempt to provide some motivational and information resources for this immense human struggle.

The global community through events like the UNs Millennium General Assembly Declaration (2000) and the Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS 2001) is committed to dramatic response. Action often falls far short of commitment.

What sorts of action are required?

• access on affordable terms to life-extending pharmaceuticals
  
  
• recognition and reinforcement of human rights, particularly the right to the “highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” (CESCR)
  
  
• resources, through the Global Fund (see pg. 27) and through other forms of aid
  
  
• debt cancellation and relief, freeing resources for public health and other essential components of immune ability – clean water, housing, adequate food
  
  
• enhancement of public health services and supports including training, public education, support for community-based prevention and care initiatives
  
  
• continued research for vaccines for HIV/AIDS, and drugs suitable for the treatment of other large-scale diseases affecting the world’s poor majorities

These initial components are all at hand. The United States alone this year increased its military budget by an amount in excess of that required to provide for achievement of Millennium Development Goals for the world for a year. Drugs exist which can extend life and health dramatically but which are not available to the vast majority of those – the poor – with HIV/AIDS.

As we go to press, the world is on the edge of war. The rhetoric of war highlights “weapons of mass destruction.” Yet, are any of those in play as significant in human threat or cost as the HIV/AIDS pandemic? The powerful and the rich have diverted attention and resources to a military conflict which would cost many lives and inflict grotesque environmental damage, while the HIV/AIDS holocaust continues.


This is a crime against humanity.
                     We could do otherwise.
                                            We must.


John W. Foster
Editor