Why We Fight
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.