In the developing world, 6.6 million children under the age of 5 are dying every year due to malnutrition (Reuters, "Malnutrition is World's Worst Child Killer," December 16). Rather than filling the headlines with such a preventable cause of childhood illness, we are inundated with reports of the growing scourge of HIV infection in Third World children. We are assured that our sympathies are better turned toward the 460,000 children under the age of 15 who have died this year, reportedly due to HIV.

We should not expect the AIDS industry to point out to us that one-third of the world's children suffer from protein malnutrition, nor that the epidemiology of that problem corresponds almost exactly to the incidence of deaths due to immune suppression now called "AIDS." 80% of such malnourished children live in Asia, mostly south Asia, the region where AIDS is said to be exploding.

Even a cheap, easily accessible therapy such as vitamin A supplementation would save the lives of about a million children a year in developing countries, and would prevent severe physical problems in millions more. In addition, such supplementation would effectively prevent HIV transmission from HIV-infected mothers to their infants, if that is really what the panic is about.

But, of course, AIDS around the globe is not a disease to eradicate, it is a market to corner, it is profit and the potential for profit. The industry that is thriving off of AIDS is no more interested in eradication than prison wardens are interested in eradicating crime or generals are interested in eradicating war.

AIDS and HIV are not the threat to the Third World. Exploitation is the threat. Malnutrition is the threat. Lack of basic living needs is the threat. It is well-recognized that the world's poor have died primarily due to diseases associated with poverty, which are primarily infectious diseases, though data also suggests that malnourished infants suffer from chronic diseases at higher rates as well.

The Third World gets the best of both chronic and acute diseases, while First World "activists" and "heatlh experts" rage ad nauseum about HIV, detected through questionable testing and increasingly treated, lo and behold, in a way that benefits First World for-profit medicine.

The roots of the malnutrition that kills children around the globe is only hidden to those who would rather not know. While infant mortality and childhood death is primarily associated with the low standard of living found throughout the Third World, it has been suggested that attempts to improve the living standards there are not a viable way to address the problem. Such thinking seems to have been de facto adopted by AIDS activists and others supposedly concerned about the health of the world's children.

Improvements in the living standard are only unsuccessful if they are done via the primary instrument of capitalistic exploitation currently in use, namely the World Bank. Not only is the Bank unsuccessful at reducing poverty and malnutrition, but it has reinforced the economic structure in the target countries, leading to the unsuccessful programs referenced above.

Direct US planning and intervention in health care and research in the Third World has been demonstrated to increase malnutrition as well.

These deaths are tangential to the AIDS "pandemic" only to those who are thoroughly blinded by AIDS hype. As such, they lack the perspective needed to understand that the deaths are 1) inexpensively preventable; 2) rooted in the exploitation of resources; and 3) perpetuated by the institutions which drive First World economics, including but not limited to the medical industry. They are real deaths happening because activists would rather buy the corporate-sponsored party line that HIV is causing it all and drugs are the savior, rather than taking on the for-profit structures that perpetuates the mass of deaths in those countries.

The real causes of death are profitable to no one. Viral causes of death are the lifeblood of First World medicine. The medical industry makes almost half a million dollars off of every HIV+ infant born in the United States. If the Third World can offer even a fraction of such stellar returns, then AIDS will be worth rallying the Save the Babies activist troops for years to come. With the publicly financed institutions such as the World Bank funding AIDS "treatment" around the globe, it is another means of transferring public funds (which is where such institutions ultimately get their money) into private hands (paid to corporations that make the drugs that "treat" AIDS). All with the blessing of both activists and shareholders.

It is a tribute to the power of propaganda that it could be pulled off like it has.