The Chicago Tribune - May 8, 2000

Yet there's little doubt that the AIDS epidemic has the potential to become more than a global catastrophe in public health (as if that, alone, were not sufficient cause for alarm in Washington).

Intelligence reports warn that AIDS could undermine social cohesion and the rule of law in many nascent democracies, turning them into hotbeds of resentment and revolution.

So it is wise, even overdue, that the National Security Council--the nation's top policymaking body on defense matters--is setting up a working group on the AIDS epidemic. And that the Clinton administration, in a companion move, is asking Congress to double foreign aid earmarked to combat the plague.

"I guess," said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott about the news, "this is just the president trying to make an appeal to, you know, certain groups."

He needs to cut the cynicism and get up to speed.

A recent National Intelligence Estimate projects that fully one quarter of the present population of southern Africa will die from AIDS, and that infection rates will continue to climb for a decade or more. This portends a "demographic catastrophe" with "a huge and impoverished orphan cohort unable to cope and vulnerable to exploitation and radicalization." Imagine armies of sunken-eyed orphans slinging AK-47s.

In sub-Saharan Africa some 11 million people already are dead, 23 million are HIV-positive and 5,000 contract the disease every day. AIDS experts fear the pattern will spread to south Asia, particularly India, where poverty, sexual mores and a lack of public health services make for epidemiological kindling.

There is far too much complacency in the U.S. and Western Europe. The West has checked its epidemics by checking risky behavior such as unprotected gay sex and drug needle-sharing. It has even checked suffering among the infected with expensive anti-retroviral drugs. Not so in the Third World, where the disease is spread like wildfire though culturally accepted heterosexual behavior and where effective medicines are beyond economic reach.

How could it be that the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth has been budgeting only $120 million a year in foreign aid to deal with this crisis? Even the $254 million Clinton wants for next year is less than the Pentagon now spends on drone aircraft.

If calling AIDS a "national security threat" is what it takes to begin dealing with the enormity of this situation, so be it.
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