By the year 2031, the AIDS pandemic will enter its 50th year, and funding needed to fight the pandemic in developing countries could reach as much as $35 billion annually – unless wise choices are made today to spend more efficiently and focus on prevention activities that can lower the number of new infections in the future and moderate costs for treatment and other measures to mitigate the negative impacts of AIDS on individuals and their communities.

In this month’s Health Affairs, a special edition focusing on the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, R4D presents the findings of the aids2031 Cost and Financing Working Group. Our paper, Critical Choices In Financing: The Response To The Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic, seeks to answer key questions:

• What are the global resource needs for AIDS through 2031?
• What are the long-term sources required for financing?
• What mix of funding resources would be most equitable, efficient, and sustainable?

To address these questions, the aids2031Working Group developed models to estimate the epidemiological and financial impacts of different policy scenarios.

"We are staring at the face of a huge crisis," says Robert Hecht, a managing director at R4D. "However, we have an opportunity to mitigate this crisis by making difficult but necessary policy choices now." In the Health Affairs paper, we argue that by investing in rapid scale-up of high-impact prevention and efficient treatment efforts, countries could cut the cost of fighting the pandemic by half while still achieving substantial results. To go even further, new game-changing technologies such as a vaccine or a treatment leading to a cure will be needed.

Read the full article in Health Affairs.