It is not something the rich can buy their way out of, even if they can afford treatment. In many countries, AIDS originally spread fastest among the better educated and relatively wealthy. The ability to pay for travel, or bar life, or sex have in effect been contributory risk factors for HIV infection. And the brute fact is that once the initial phase of denial is over, the impact of AIDS on wealthier countries and on wealthier sectors even in poor countries, has helped to mobilise the necessary political response to the epidemic. So it would be a terrible mistake to position AIDS simply as a disease of poverty.
Poverty is now one of the main drivers of the global epidemic.
The majority of people with HIV are in the developing world. Not only are economic inequalities reflected in the epidemic, they are made worse as energy is sapped from sectors that would otherwise be able to help economic progress. And it is poverty that is the biggest obstacle to access to effective HIV treatments for the 35 million people with HIV in the developing world. Underlying causes of poverty are also made worse by AIDS - for example, illiteracy increases as children suffering the impacts of AIDS cannot sustain their schooling, and as education systems lose teachers more rapidly than they can be replaced. Our task is therefore to understand and address the profound connection between AIDS and poverty, while not reducing AIDS to poverty.