Medical service: footnote

The first three of these are expensive technologies that do little to decrease the major causes of mortality, and the money would be much better spent directly aimed at actual need. The fourth, unfortunately, is not a matter of need but effect. The profitless cost of a month’s worth of HIV therapy, $300, is the same amount of money most sub-Saharan governments have available to treat 500 people for an entire year. In this population, in a year, 100 or more will present with a potentially curable but life-threatening illness, such as falciparam malaria, tetanus, tuberculosis, or obstructed labor. Dangerously, some Western organizations have, by campaigning single mindedly for HIV treatment, unknowingly influenced the redirection of health funds away from large populations of the poor with cheaply and readably treatable disease, and given these instead to a population with an incurable illness.