On World AIDS Day, CBS News Commits An Act Of Journalistic Irresponsibility

Twenty years ago today, the World Health Organization created “World AIDS Day” to raise awareness about the deadly pandemic of HIV/AIDS. AIDS has killed over 25 million people since 1981. Last year alone two million people died from AIDS, more than ten percent of those were children. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be highly contagious and highly and easily preventable. 

The good news is that anti-retroviral drugs have enabled those living with HIV to lead relatively normal lives. Recently, HIV has been compared to diseases like diabetes, controllable although potentially deadly if not managed daily. Which has led some to question the amount of funding spent in controlling the spread of the disease, and finding a cure and a vaccine. 

News organizations around the world recently published the comments of Syracuse University’s Jeremy Shiffman, who is questioning if HIV/AIDS is over-funded. He stated, 

“AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it’s just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies”

Today, CBS News published an article that grossly misrepresented a statement released by the head of the World Health Organization, made in response to the global economic crisis. Here are the paragraphs, which I assume are accurate, that lead up to their false reporting:

“”There needs to be a rational system for how to apportion scarce funds,” said Helen Epstein, an AIDS expert who has consulted for UNICEF, the World Bank, and others. 

AIDS advocates say their projects do more than curb the virus; their efforts strengthen other health programs by providing basic health services. 

But across Africa, about 1.5 million doctors and nurses are still needed, and hospitals regularly run out of basic medicines. 

Experts working on other health problems struggle to attract money and attention when competing with AIDS. 

“Diarrhea kills five times as many kids as AIDS,” said John Oldfield, executive vice president of Water Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes clean water and sanitation. 

“Everybody talks about AIDS at cocktail parties,” Oldfield said. “But nobody wants to hear about diarrhea,” he said. 

These competing claims on public money are likely to grow louder as the world financial meltdown threatens to deplete health dollars.”

But in an irresponsible and over-reaching attempt to strengthen their report, CBS News then followed with this:

“”We cannot afford, in this time of crisis, to squander our investments,” Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general, said in a recent statement.”

Sounds like Dr. Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, the very organization that founded World AIDS Day, agrees that AIDS funding should be cut. Well, here is the statement from Dr. Chan, in context:

“A world that is greatly out of balance in health is neither stable nor secure. Robust health systems are essential to maintain surveillance and response capacity in the face of pandemic threats. The lack of investment in sub-Saharan African health systems in the 1980s meant they were tragically unprepared for the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the decade that followed.

We must not repeat the mistakes of the past. We cannot afford, in this time of crisis, to squander our investments, to abandon our drive for greater balance in this world, which I firmly believe is a marker of civilized society. I am calling on all governments and political leaders to maintain their efforts to strengthen and improve the performance of their health systems, to protect the health of the people of the world, and in particular of those most fragile, in face of the present financial and economic crisis.”

Clearly, Dr. Chan was not agreeing that HIV/AIDS funding should be cut at this critical time. She was calling for the opposite. 

Shame on CBS for their irresponsible reporting. I call on Dr. Chan and the World Health Organization to demand CBS clarifies her remarks and apologizes for their lack of journalistic integrity in this report.

Video: Director-General of the World Health Organization Dr Margaret Chan speaks on the Global Situation and Strategies for addressing HIV/TB at the HIV/TB Global Leaders’ Forum.