Learning from AIDS: Responding to non-communicable diseases It
is the chronic nature of AIDS that is giving governments and
health experts a new opportunity -- to use health systems set up
for HIV/AIDS care and treatment and strengthen them to address
NCDs. As executive director of UNAIDS from 1994 to 2008, I was
privileged to have a front row seat at one of the great global
health struggles of modern times. Although our work against AIDS
is far from finished, we have stabilized the pandemic and
started to imagine a world without AIDS. Unfortunately, the same
is not true of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer,
cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and
diabetes, which cause nearly two out of three deaths in the
world (80 percent of those in developing countries). Infectious
diseases like AIDS continue to have a devastating impact on the
health and development of many low- and middle-income countries,
particularly in Africa. However, NCDs have slowly emerged, in
the words of The Economist