There have been some notable—and laudatory—examples of large companies that have launched AIDS awareness and treatment campaigns in high-risk countries. Anglo American is now operating the first large-scale AIDS treatment program in South Africa. Standard Chartered Bank spent $300,000 last year (or approximately $10 for each of its employees world-wide) on a peer education and  prevention campaign. Nike has started to work with its major suppliers in Asia to ensure that employees have access to potentially life-lifesaving information about HIV.

Producers of Kenyan tea and Malawi cotton, as well as the auto manufacturers with assembly plants in South Africa, are well aware of the consequences of the HIV rampage. Many have to hire three people for every vacant job position and are accustomed to having 10 percent of their staff absent every day. AIDS can come close to halting productivity and cancelling out the efficiency in  of initially low operating costs. And because an AIDS-ridden population is an unemployed population, it can destroy consumer markets.

Yet when the World Economic Forum, working with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Harvard University, polled nearly 8,000 executives running operations in 103 different countries, fewer than six 6 percent indicated their companies had HIV policies. Nearly half thought HIV was not likely to have a serious impact on the communities in which their businesses operate. What is also cause for alarm is that 36 percent of those questioned did not know how many of their employees were infected with HIV.

That the incidence of infection is growing in the areas that offer cheap labor—such as China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe—is not accidental. As manufacturing facilities spring up, a segment of the developing world population that we might call “mobile men with money” increases. These are men who spend a good deal of their time travelling on business, with the income and opportunity to indulge in sex and drugs, thereby placing themselves and their families at risk of infection.  

In Asia, where approximately 7.4 million people now live with HIV, the virus is spreading so rapidly that if present rates continue, the cases there will outnumber those in Africa within a decade. Health experts estimate that at least 300,000 people contracted HIV in India in 2003, bringing the total to somewhere between 4.3 and 5.3 million. The low incidence of reported cases in China obscures the fact that serious, concentrated epidemics have been under way for many years in certain regions, including the booming manufacturing province of Guangdong, and are on the verge of taking off in several others. If these countries follow an African-type trajectory, their advantages of low-cost labor and their growing consumer classes will be adversely affected.

Given the seven-year plus lag between HIV infection and AIDS, businesses operating in Asia may not actually experience the devastating effects until a crisis is under way, at which time it will be a costly problem to manage. Businesses in countries with lower prevalence of the disease should consider how to leverage their core business strengths, such as marketing, to beat the stigma of AIDS by publicizing prevention techniques to workers and to the community. Businesses in higher-prevalence countries should explore investment in their workforces by offering voluntary counselling, testing and treatment programs, including access to AIDS drugs.

Breaking the silence and raising awareness could be achieved if the leading businesses in each country added HIV/AIDS prevention to existing induction training and occupational health and safety programs. And because the fate of the communities in which products are made does ultimately affect the entire global economy, corporations should extend their anti-AIDS efforts to include their suppliers, distributors and customers or the communities where they operate. Even setting aside all humanitarian considerations, to regard the problem purely from the standpoint of self-interest, the corporate sector has much at stake here in confronting this global epidemic.

More information about the Global Health Initiative and its work can be found at www.weforum.org/globalhealth. 

Kate Taylor, a physician specializing in international public health, is director of the Global Health Initiative at the World Economic Forum in Geneva.