This is a joint post with Rachel Silverman.
Through our Value for Money working group, we’ve spent much of the past year immersed in the world of global health funding agencies. With so many new agencies, particularly in the last quarter century (Figure 1), understanding the intricacies of the global health family can be daunting, even for the most devoted observers.
What if by taking a pill every day, all 33 million HIV-infected people in the world could not only fend off the deterioration of their own health, but also reduce their chances of infecting uninfected sex partners by 96 %? This is the prospect that is offered by newly announced results of the HPTN 052 trial. (See the Kaiser Foundation report here, the UNAIDS announcement here
On January 6-7, PEPFAR convened a legally constituted Scientific Advisory Board and just yesterday, posted a web site dedicated to it. The web site includes several PowerPoint presentations which provide an excellent overview of PEPFAR’s perceived research needs and of the meetings’ concluding recommendations.
UNAIDS, WHO, PEPFAR and the Global Fund for AIDS TB and Malaria (GFATM) all depend on long-run projections in order to make the case for increased attention and financing for AIDS. This dependency is a response to the reality that HIV is a slow epidemic with extraordinary “momentum”. Even small changes in the course of new infections require years to implement and have health and fiscal consequences for decades thereafter. According to the UNAIDS web site, “[s]ince 2001, the UNAIDS Secretariat have le
About a year ago the Institute of Medicine assembled a committee of 12 to advise the US on the implications for its policy towards Africa of the long-term burden of AIDS there. The two co-chairs of the committee, Tom Quinn and David Serwadda, will release the report findings to the press on Monday, November 27 here in DC, and I will help them respond to questions from the press and public. A formal description of the committee’s mandate and a complete list of the committee members can be found here. If you would
Not as large or energizing as previous AIDS conferences, the Vienna 2010 jamboree officially kicked off on Sunday night at the Messe Wien Center. Soothing classical music wafted through the auditorium, creating a somewhat surreal setting for a conference that will be characterized by frustration and bitterness about the world's flagging funding commitments to combating AIDS. Protestors gathered their banners and posters and marched through the auditorium shouting: "Broken Promises Kill. No Retreat.
On Sunday the New York Times published four article on the battle against AIDS in Uganda which everyone should read who is interested in the AIDS epidemic, or in the effectiveness of US aid policy in general. The articles, all by the Times’ knowledgeable science reporter and long-time observer of the AIDS epidemic DonMcNeil, include:
This is a joint post with Molly Kinder and originally appeared on the Global Development: Views from the Center blog.
This week The New York Times Magazine is dedicated to a single theme: women. The main attraction of this special issue is a stirring essay by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who write passionately about the great moral, national security and economic development imperatives of investing in the world’s women and girls. The “women’s crusade” they call for seems already to have begun. A few pages beyond, an interview with Secretary Clinton heralds the start of a “new gender agenda” at the highest reaches of the U.S. foreign policy. Also noted is the growing philanthropic attention to the cause of women and girls – a trend that will be further evidenced next month, when the issue headlines at the annual (Bill) Clinton Global Initiative meetings in NYC.
It’s often said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. But in the area of program evaluation, the enthusiasm for a humanitarian program can lead to wide dissemination of optimistic results even if they are based on a flawed evaluation technique. In this case, the bad is the enemy of the good – because poor quality evaluation can deflect interest from good evaluation.
On April 3rd, The Committee of Cosponsoring Organizations(CCO), a forum for the 10 cosponsoring UN agencies who work on HIV/AIDS, met for the first time since Michel Sidibé took up his post as the next Executive Director at UNAIDS. The meeting, one of two held by the CCO ever year, was the first opportunity for the group to meet with Mr. Sidibé.