Time For Gen. Y To Prevent the Next AIDS Epidemic

Since HIV/AIDS was first identified in the United States in the early 1980s, the costs associated with treatment and prevention efforts have been steep and they keep rising. According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the U.S. government had spent more than $100 billion combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2002. The House Foreign Affairs Committee recently approved a bill that would allocate $50 billion for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, an initiative to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.

These huge funding amounts are being put to good and important ends. Amongst other efforts, the money provides drugs for HIV-positive people around the world so that they can live longer and have many more productive years than they otherwise would have without the drugs. And no matter how you feel about President Bush, his efforts to deal with HIV/AIDS around the world has made a significant dent in the fight against this disease and is certainly one of the greatest accomplishments of his presidency. Although these are promising indicators regarding America's role in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, it would be a lot more desirable if the global epidemic wasn't as extensive as it is and didn't require the spending that it does (but it is essential for the U.S. to spend the money and here are 10 reasons why). So in terms of HIV/AIDS, the cat's out the bag.

My concern is that extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), a strain of the disease that is almost untreatable and kills most of the people it affects, will be Generation Y's HIV/AIDS epidemic. Last week, the World Health Organization released a report about drug-resistant TB around the world and the findings aren't pretty. The report found that multi drug- resistant TB -- a less severe form of the disease, which is also difficult to treat -- has reached its "highest levels ever" and that XDR-TB has been detected in 45 countries around the world, according to a Los Angeles Times article about the report. The paper also published an editorial about the report's findings, which said:

If most Americans aren't concerned by this, it's because they don't yet understand that drug-resistant tuberculosis is no longer a disease that
threatens mainly HIV and AIDS patients and the Third World poor. It threatens us
all... Tuberculosis is an airborne disease that can be transmitted by a cough or
a sneeze -- much easier to spread than HIV.

The emergence of drug-resistant TB has emerged more recently than HIV/AIDS and global programs are under-funded. In reaction to the report, Mario Raviglione, the director of the World Health Organization's TB control program, said, "TB drug resistance needs a frontal assault... If countries and the international community fail to address it aggressively now, we will lose this battle."

Unfortunately drug-resistant TB seems to be one of the most severe emerging global health threats today. But there is time to prevent it from becoming like a second HIV/AIDS epidemic. Up-and-coming Gen. Y leaders need to be aware of this transnational health issue and use their civic sensibilities to address this before it spins totally out of control. The financial and human cost could rival HIV/AIDS or even surpass it. Howard Markell, a professor of communicable diseases and the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, described a potential nightmare situation in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed. Markell wrote, "The rising worldwide number of XDR-TB cases... may herald the end of a glorious 60-year holiday from many common and highly contagious diseases -- such as polio, measles and cholera -- that once routinely ravaged vast swaths of humanity."

Millennials, our time to prevent this catastrophe is now. It's just a question of action and mobilization. This is an opportunity for our generation to take the reigns so that we don't have to deal with the dramatic consequences of not doing so.

Learn more:

• The Global Health Council lobbies the U.S. government about global health issues, including TB.


• The Stop TB Partnership works to eliminate TB as a public health problem