My local metro station was recently plastered in enormous pictures of brightly-colored condoms as a public health campaign to mark World AIDS Day, which is today. The accompanying slogan, "It's up to YOU to prevent the spread of AIDS" (translated, obviously), immediately brought to mind the old Smokey Bear line: "Only YOU can prevent forest fires."

This pop-ification of the anti-AIDS message is so commonplace as to be entirely banal. And some public health experts think it does a disservice to global health concerns.

"AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it's just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies," said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.

Roger England of Health Systems Workshop, a think tank based in the Caribbean island of Grenada, goes further. He argues that UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the fight against the disease, has outlived its purpose and should be disbanded.

"The global HIV industry is too big and out of control. We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake, ... too many relatively well paid HIV staff in affected countries, and too many rock stars with AIDS support as a fashion accessory," he wrote in the British Medical Journal in May.

It's easy, of course, to criticize anything that has been adopted by celebrity culture as a frivolous cause. And to me, disbanding UNAIDS sounds like a terrible idea. But it does seem legitimate to question the place of AIDS in our international health priorities, given facts such as these:

By 2006, AIDS funding accounted for 80 percent of all American aid for health and population issues, according to the Global Health Council.

In Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and elsewhere, donations for HIV projects routinely outstrip the entire national health budgets.

The key is to rebalance priorities without minimizing the very real and continuing global AIDS epidemic. It's true that in the developed world, AIDS today is a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. But it's equally true that infection rates should be FAR lower than they still are. Making anti-AIDS paraphanalia into a fashion accessory is surely not the best way to do that -- but neither is eliminating UNAIDS, or talking as if AIDS is no longer a big deal.