This report by the UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group argues that the new executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS should focus on a few essential tasks: promoting evidence-based prevention and treatment strategies, ensuring that UN agencies adequately support countries severely affected by HIV, and pressing rich-country governments to live up to their pledges to help poor countries respond to the epidemic.
U.S. spending on global AIDS is widely seen as a significant foreign policy and humanitarian success, but this success contains the seeds of a future crisis. Treatment costs are set to escalate dramatically and new HIV infections continue to outpace the number of people receiving treatment. Three bad options thus loom ahead for U.S. foreign policy: indefinitely increase foreign assistance spending on an open-ended commitment, eliminate half of other foreign aid programs, or withdraw the medicine that millions of people depend upon to stay alive. CGD senior fellow Mead Over provides another option: implementing a sustainable policy that concentrates on prevention in order to drastically cut new infections while sustaining the reduction in AIDS-related deaths.
Faced with many urgent challenges, the next U.S. president may be tempted to let global health issues bubble along on the back burner and simply allow reasonably well-funded programs that garner bipartisan support to continue unchanged. This would be a mistake. Instead, the president should set an ambitious course to improve global health by leveraging the full range of U.S. assets to create a more just and safe world.
Donors spend billions of dollars to fight HIV/AIDS in developing countries, but poor integration between donors and host country health systems risks undermining international efforts to prevent and treat AIDS. In this analysis, CGD’s HIV/AIDS Monitor argues that donors need to pay more attention to their overall effect on health systems, finding that the big international donors often create duplicate AIDS-specific systems that competitively draw on the health resources of developing countries. The report recommends taking specific steps to more broadly improve health information systems, improve supply chain systems, and strengthen the health workforce.
U.S. global AIDS spending is helping to prolong the lives of more than a million people, yet this success contains the seeds of a future crisis. Escalating treatment costs coupled with neglected prevention measures mean that AIDS spending is growing so rapidly that it threatens to squeeze out U.S. spending on other global health needs, even to the point of consuming half of the entire U.S. foreign assistance budget by 2016. Mead Over argues that AIDS treatment spending could quickly become a global entitlement since withdrawing funding for life-saving drugs would mean death for the beneficiaries. He offers suggestions for avoiding a ballooning AIDS treatment entitlement, including greatly stepped-up prevention efforts.
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