Why do HIV and AIDS still get more attention than hepatitis?

“Not enough attention is paid to hepatitis worldwide, when compared to the HIV and AIDS pandemic”, pointed out Dr Quaid Saeed, national programme officer on HIV/AIDS and hepatitis at the World Health Organisation. But in Pakistan, hepatitis is a far bigger problem. The various viruses of hepatitis have infected over 7pc of the population, compared to the 0.1pc infected with HIV/AIDS.

“There is just no comparison between the huge number of people infected with hepatitis and those with HIV”, said Saeed. And while the funds for the hepatitis programme are more than those for the HIV and AIDS programme, these are still miniscule.“For hepatitis, unless the ‘pipeline of new infections’ is stemmed, the money allocated for treatment will never be enough”, said Dr Ayesha Khan, who heads the Islamabad-based Research and Development Solutions (RADS). Citing the planning documents, more popularly called PC-1s, she said that the prime minister’s national hepatitis programme allocated Rs 8.8bn for hepatitis (2010 - 2015) and for HIV/AIDS(2009-2013) Rs7bn were requested but not approved. The HIV and AIDS programme gets money from  various donors and Global Fund for AIDS, TB and malaria (GFATM), but I am not sure of the exact amount that was finally allocated”. One reason is the skewed way it is used up. “Whatever comes into the hepatitis programme is used more for treatment than prevention. “Instead of trying to stop new infections, money is spent on treating patients,” said Saeed. It requires Rs600,000 to treat a patient.

So then why do HIV and AIDS still get more attention than hepatitis?

“Worldwide more people die from AIDS than hepatitis because the latter is a slow unfolding tragedy and not very visible either”, explained Saeed.

Another reason pointed out by Khan was that foreign funds were diverted more towards AIDS, TB and malaria than on hepatitis. “Even the World Bank poured in millions of dollars to address this limited scale issue”, she said.

“AIDS is a bigger problem there than hepatitis and therefore they have more money for the former. Earlier we would suggest that hepatitis should be linked to HIV and AIDS, however, in retrospect, I think we should not compromise on the AIDS programme but strengthen the hepatitis programme,” said Aftab Mohsin, former national programme manager of the Prime Minister’s Programme for Prevention and Control of Hepatitis and one the country’s leading liver and gastroenterology physicians, based in Lahore.

Due to the inaction by the decision and policymakers to contain the disease, Saeed is worried that in the next decade or so, Pakistan will see a huge population, all in their productive age, suffering from hepatitis. “It will be too late then”, he rued.

He said creating awareness among the people would, in the long run, yield far better results by controlling the spread of the disease than the more expensive and curative measures. n —Zofeen T. Ebrahim