Gradually adhering to the new guidelines will add 10 percent to the currently estimated $22-24 billion needed each year to fully respond to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. That figure that includes not only treatment but also prevention and diagnostics, he said.
In 2011, the actual global spend stood close to $17 billion.
“But the impact will be substantial,” he said, stressing that “we are expecting three million additional deaths avoided between now and 2025, and 3.5 million additional new infections averted.”
Sidibe meanwhile said he believed that rather than growing, the costs of treating HIV patients would soon begin shrinking as drug and diagnostics prices continue their decline – and as countries find smarter ways of delivering the treatment.
Many countries “are really seeing the benefit of putting their people on treatment,” he said.
“Fewer deaths, less sickness,” took a burden off the healthcare system and meant HIV patients could remain in the workforce and contribute to the economy for longer, he pointed out.
This, in addition to the belief that more treatment will help avert infections, eventually leaving fewer people to treat, makes the investment a no-brainer, Sidibe said.
“If we do not pay now, we will pay later, we’ll pay forever,” he said.
The world has already scaled up treatment dramatically.
ART has reached 30 times more people last year than a decade earlier, when only 300,000 people in low and middle-income countries were receiving the then exceedingly expensive drugs, Gundo Weiler, of WHO’s HIV/AIDS department, pointed out.
“Over the last decade, the scale-up of antiretroviral treatment in low- and middle-income countries has averted 4.2 million deaths,” he said.
Efforts to avoid mother-to-foetus transmission of the disease had also helped 800,000 children escape infection.
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