Senior fellow Mead Over is featured in an NPR piece on the US Government's newly released blueprint for 'an AIDs-free generation.'
Before Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton passes the reins to her successor, she's got a few loose ends to tie up. One of them is mapping out the U.S.'s continuing efforts to combat AIDS around the world.
So today she unveiled a "blueprint" for what she called an "AIDS-free generation."
Now Clinton isn't talking about ending the HIV pandemic altogether. Rather, she hopes to prevent most new infections from occurring in the first place and to stop HIV-positive people from developing AIDS.
Clinton's AIDS blueprint hinges heavily on a "treatment as prevention" strategy. Indeed, the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR is spending millions of dollars to see if it will in South Africa, Tanzania and Botswana, health economist Mead Over, of the Center for Global Development, tells Shots.
He says it will take several years to get the results. And that's one reason, he says, that "it's premature to have as an objective achieving an AIDS-free generation."
The tipping point for AIDS, Over says, will be when the number of new infections is lower than the number of people dying from HIV. Once that happens, the total number of HIV positive people would begin to decline.
"That's not the case now," he says. "In fact the gap is widening as we speak."