Why Are We Campaigning?
Thirty years after the AIDS pandemic emerged, budget cuts to international and domestic
AIDS programs threaten to halt progress in eliminating the disease. The AIDS pandemic is
one of the greatest public health and moral challenges of our time; though tools to address
the disease exist in abundance, the systems that allow HIV/AIDS to flourish continue to
produce beggars, orphans, and devastated families. Bringing currently available tools to
scale could alter the profile of the pandemic for good. But political leadership that has
consistently failed to increase funding for treatment renders even the best science
powerless, and the costs of inaction are unacceptably high.
Large‐scale youth mobilization is necessary at this historical moment in the domestic and
global responses to the pandemic, when frozen global health budgets threaten to
undermine recent progress and consign millions to early deaths from a preventable and
treatable disease.
