Local Rally for a Global Crisis

When scores of Harvard students braved cold and drizzle Sunday to rally for increased funding for AIDS prevention and treatment, they demonstrated Harvard activists’ dedication to combating the AIDS crisis. Federal and state officials should heed students’ rising voices and allocate money to the effort. The activists’ demands for increased U.S. and state funding for the prevention and treatment of AIDS and other diseases should be met.

AIDS is undeniably a global epidemic; every day an estimated 8,200 people with AIDS die and 14,000 people are infected with the HIV virus. The activists’ demands—that the U.S. fund global prevention, treatment and research of AIDS with $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2003 and $1.2 billion in emergency spending immediately, and that Massachusetts restore the $9.7 million cut from its AIDS budget—are eminently reasonable, considering the lives and money that timely prevention and research promise to save. AIDS and tuberculosis and malaria—the other diseases U.S. money would fight—take a particularly heavy toll in the developing world; of the 36 million people infected with HIV worldwide, more than 95 percent live in developing countries. Especially in these places, where little treatment or prevention is currently available, U.S. money would save lives at a bargain rate.

The efforts of the Harvard AIDS Coalition encouraged many Harvard students, who may not have gone otherwise, to participate in the rally on Sunday.

The Coalition’s work to publicize the rally and the AIDS crisis—work including door-to-door canvassing, leafleting, postering and personal e-mails to students—resulted in a turnout of more than 100 Harvard students. The Coalition also helped garner turnout by organizing a party to leave from each House’s dining hall, so interested students could travel to the rally together. The Harvard AIDS Coalition should be commended for inspiring the student body to protest insufficient funding of AIDS research, treatment and prevention. Students’ attendance at the rally helped publicize the lack of U.S. funding that compounds the AIDS tragedy.