Global Health and Foreign Policy

Feldbaum, Harley; Lee, Kelley; Michaud, Joshua

The framing of the HIV/AIDS pandemic as a threat to national security, predominantly between 2000 and 2005, also provides insights into the costs and benefits of linking health issues to national security agendas. This linkage, which generated attention from the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations General Assembly, raised the political priority of HIV/AIDS, which contributed to efforts to establish the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and increased the amount of development assistance for health on global AIDS, particularly in the United States (130, 131) . However, much of the evidence used to frame the disease as a national security threat, including evidence on the prevalence of HIV among African militaries (132, 133) and its potential to cause instability in ''next wave'' states (134, p. 4; 135) , has been shown to be inaccurate (136) (137) (138) (139) (140) . Furthermore, linkage of the disease to national security agendas may have contributed to the possibly disproportionate focus on the pandemic in national aid budgets (141) and has been criticized (142) for its potential to push response to the disease ''away from civil society toward state institutions such as the military and the intelligence community'' (143, p. 122) or to push funding towards countries of strategic importance, rather than those most in need (127) .