“HOW much does the world want to eliminate AIDS?” That was the question hanging over the 22nd meeting of the International AIDS Society (IAS), which opened in Amsterdam this week. “How much” is a phrase with two possible interpretations: emotional desire and financial willingness.

The IAS meetings, which began in 1985 as workshops for scientists and clinicians, quickly attracted activists and celebrities. Bureaucracies followed. In 1996 UNAIDS, an agency dedicated to dealing with the illness, was set up. In 2002 the Global Fund, a public-private partnership, was created to raise and spend money on AIDS, and on tuberculosis and malaria. In 2003 America’s PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, got going. Combined with the efforts of health services, these organisations have helped turn things around. The annual death rate from an illness that has, so far, killed 35m people, has fallen from a peak of 1.9m to 900,000. New-infection rates have dropped from 3.4m to 1.8m. And 22m people are now on antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).

This is all cause for celebration. But there is also a sense that things are fraying at the edges. Targets are not being met. Money is not arriving as expected. A scandal at UNAIDS, involving allegations of sexual harassment by a former deputy director (who denies wrongdoing), is casting shadows. And scientific progress is patchy.

The peak of AIDS hubris seemed to come at the IAS meeting in Melbourne in July 2014. Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS’s director, announced the 90-90-90 aspiration—that by 2020, 90% of those infected will know they have the disease, 90% of those will be on ARVs, and 90% of them will have their virus levels suppressed to the point of clinical negligibility. This was ambitious enough. But in December of that year, the UN itself topped it by proposing an “end to AIDS” by 2030.

Neither of these things is going to happen. Read more via the Economist