Once again Aids is in vogue with a new book of "expert opinion" from former UN/World Health Organisation Aids worker Elizabeth Pisani, claiming that the anti-retroviral medicines used on the HIV positive simply mask the problem rather than solving it, creating a multi-million-pound industry in the process.

Ms Pisani is reiterating the obvious: the trouble is that until now those doing so were usually from the anti-gay and anti-junkie lobbies (religious fundamentalists and the far-right).

Aids kills someone on this planet every five minutes, according to Unicef (and contrary to the gay lobby's claim of every minute). That ghastly accolade belongs to rabies, and even it is no competition for malaria's mortality rate of one every 30 seconds, and which all the insecticides and mosquito nets in the world have failed to halt.

The result of our half-hearted war is that there is now a malarial strain resistant to the chloroquine drugs that have kept it in check for over a century, condemning three million a year to a painful death, and a staggering half-billion others to sickness. Meanwhile, the "mad death" literally runs riot worldwide (especially in China), primarily because governments hush up cases out of fear it will have a detrimental effect on tourism, and to prevent panic.

Billions of taxpayers' money worldwide are thrown at a disease that can take years just to reach the HIV stage - let alone kill - while a fraction of that thrown at malaria and rabies would see two of the greatest scourges to all life, not just mankind, pushed to the periphery. Until they kill a few celebrities, as has Aids, the truth is the majority of "civilisation" won't give a damn.

Mark Boyle, Johnstone.