It is easy to be cynical about corporate social responsibility schemes. The mental images of corporate hypocrisy are effortlessly evoked: the swaggering CEO hosting a lavish launch party for his new charitable initiative, the expensive branding exercises for the campaign, the pictures of executives touching down in West Nusa Tenggara or Brazil after full-expenses paid, private-jet flights for photographs with poorly children who are likely to find that HIV progresses to Aids because the medicine is too costly or simply not there. And so the businessmen fly back, wallet no lighter than before except for the odd bottle of San Miguel needed on their philanthropic trip.
However, it is perhaps these businessmen who are realising that their say in how awareness is raised is just as important as any government’s.
The RED campaign was created by U2 front man Bono and Bobby Shriver, a famous attorney. RED is perhaps the most ubiquitous when it comes to the lead-up to Word Aids Day. Backed by Starbucks, Gap, Hallmark, Converse, Armani, Apple – even a YouTube cameo from Katy Perry – it is a huge global campaign made up of a network of scarily huge corporate faces.
“[RED] is not a charity,” says the website. “It’s a business model designed to create awareness and a sustainable flow of money from the private sector into the Global Fund, to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. Consumers buy (PRODUCT) RED, and at no cost to them, money is sent directly to the Global Fund.”
Sounds very capitalist, but when you look at the $140m raised by the campaign for the fund – which helped to provide anti-retroviral drugs – it is hard to deny that some help, however tainted, is better than none at all.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 33.4 million people are infected with the Aids virus worldwide, up from 33 million in 2007.
However, according to the same report issued by WHO and the Joint United Nations Programme, the availability of HIV drugs has allowed people with the disease to live longer. The report said: “The number of Aids-related deaths has declined by over 10 per cent over the past five years as more people gained access to life-saving treatment.”
Whilst there is currently no completely effective vaccine, the headlines remain upbeat.
“Scientists say they have decoded the entire genetic content of HIV-1. They hope this will pave the way to a greater understanding of how the virus operates, and potentially accelerate the development of drug treatments,” reported BBC News.
And again: “Researchers in the US including scientists at the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) have discovered two powerful new antibodies to HIV, which may rejuvenate the search for an Aids vaccine.” Amidst the silence surrounding HIV and Aids, there is still groundbreaking medical research being done in order to develop better drugs and ultimately, a fully effective vaccine.
In the United States alone, approximately 1.1 million individuals were living with HIV at the end of 2006. It is understood that as many as 21 per cent of those persons were unaware of being infected according to the Centre for Disease Control. In Britain, there were twice as many new cases of HIV recorded than anywhere else in Western Europe; with gay and bisexual men constituting 38 per cent of all new HIV diagnoses made in 2008 – an unpromising figure which suggests that so much more needs to be done at community level to increase awareness and increase the information resources available. For example, in a straw poll of friends and family, one person out of 20 knew that PEP treatment was available on the NHS – which could be crucial and even life-saving for someone who may think they have acquired HIV.
PEP is Post Exposure Prophylaxis: it’s the medical term for the state a person is in after exposure to the virus. If someone believes they may have just been exposed to HIV after what is considered high-risk sexual activity, they do not have to suffer in silence or wait – they should take action within the first 72 hours. Again, this fact was completely lost on people during the straw poll who thought that they would simply have to wait the full three weeks for blood test results. Accident and Emergency departments or GUM clinics can provide a month’s course of HIV medication in the form of two or three-a-day pills. For the countries lucky enough to afford this medicine for HIV, the progression to Aids is not unavoidable and patient survival rates have been changed by anti-retrovirals. However, there is still no cure.
Perhaps the real corporate social responsibility does not lie with chain coffee shops and big computer companies famous for their mp3-players. Perhaps it lies with the health companies and healthcare workers themselves. It seems governments are lacking the attention from the public needed to raise enough awareness. Indirectly then, they cannot put enough pressure on large pharmaceutical companies to ease off on drug patenting in order to make HIV treatment cost less and become more accessible across the world – maybe the force of a high street chain store is necessary to start debate and destroy the stigma surrounding it.
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