This brief summarizes the recommendations in Achieving an AIDS Transition to use focused policies and well-designed incentives to finally bring the AIDS epidemic under control.
Five million people in poor countries are receiving AIDS treatment, but international AIDS policy is still in crisis. This book shows how to reach an “AIDS transition,” which would keep AIDS deaths down by sustaining treatment while pushing new infections even lower, so that the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS finally begins to decline.
In this paper, the authors set out to study how increased access to antiretroviral therapy affects sexual behavior in Mozambique. The researchers found that greater access to antiretroviral therapy led Mozambicans to perceive HIV/AIDS as less dangerous and to engage in more risky sexual behavior. The authors conclude that prevention programs must include educational messages about antiretroviral therapy in order to temper changing beliefs about HIV.
Using panel data from Mozambique collected in 2007 and 2008, the authors explore the impact of the food crisis on the welfare of households living with HIV/AIDS. While HIV households have not suffered more from the crisis than others, infected people who experienced a negative income shock also expereinced a reduction or a slower progression in outcomes when treating their illness.
In the final installation of a three-part series, Mead Over estimates the fiscal burden of international AIDS treatment programs, and suggests ways that donors, governments, and patients can sustain current treatments while preventing future cases.
This essay proposes ways to improve the effectiveness of HIV prevention by strengthening incentives for both measurement and achievement. It builds upon a companion essay that proposes an “AIDS Transition”—that is, a gradual reduction in the number of people infected with HIV even as those inflected live longer—as a reasonable objective of donor and government AIDS policy.
Recognizing the donors’ obligation to sustain financing for the millions of AIDS patient who would not be alive today without it, this essay proposes a dynamic paradigm for the struggle with the AIDS epidemic—“the AIDS transition” —and argues that to most rapidly achieve an AIDS transition new funding of AIDS treatment should be tightly linked to dramatically improved and transparently measured prevention of HIV infections.
This paper proposes a cash-on-delivery approach to reward AIDS programs in accordance with the number of verifiable HIV infections they avert.
CGD senior fellow Mead Over and Owen McCarthy offer a users' manual and Stata software to help students and instructors of public health, development economics, or health economics to project the future budgetary cost of AIDS treatment in poor countries and to explore the many factors affecting the calculation.
This dataset compiles selected global variables on AIDS and its treatment and prevention. The data are in the format developed by the Stata statistical software corporation and are intended for use with Over and McCarthy's AIDSCost package for the purpose of projecting the future budgetary cost of scaling up AIDS treatment.
Senior fellow Mead Over estimates the effect of AIDS on poverty in South Asia and analyzes public policy options to help the region’s predominantly private health care systems meet the challenge of treating AIDS. He finds that South Asian governments should play a larger role in AIDS treatment than in other aspects of health care, in the interest of both efficiency and equity.
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.
The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President shows how modest changes in U.S. policies could greatly improve the lives of poor people in developing countries, thus fostering greater stability, security, and prosperity globally and at home. Center for Global Development experts offer fresh perspectives and practical advice on trade policy, migration, foreign aid, climate change and more. In an introductory essay, CGD President Nancy Birdsall explains why and how the next U.S. president must lead in the creation of a better, safer world.
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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