Topics:
Expertise
Health economics, Applied econometrics, Epidemiological and economic simulation modeling, Impact evaluation, AIDS.
Bio
Mead Over is a senior fellow emeritus at the Center for Global Development researching economics of efficient, effective, and cost-effective health interventions in developing countries. Much of his work since 1987, first at the World Bank and now at the CGD, is on the economics of the AIDS epidemic. After work on the economic impact of the AIDS epidemic and on cost-effective interventions, he co-authored the Bank’s first comprehensive treatment of the economics of AIDS in the book, Confronting AIDS: Public Priorities for a Global Epidemic (1997,1999). His most recent book is Achieving an AIDS Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment (2011)in which he offers options, for donors, recipients, activists and other participants in the fight against HIV, to reverse the trend in the epidemic through better prevention. His previous publications include The Economics of Effective AIDS Treatment: Evaluating Policy Options for Thailand (2006). Other papers examine the economics of preventing and of treating malaria. In addition to ongoing work on the determinants of adherence to AIDS treatment in poor countries, he is working on optimal pricing of health care services at the periphery, on the measurement and explanation of the efficiency of health service delivery in poor countries and on optimal interventions to control a global influenza pandemic.
In addition to his numerous research projects at the Center, Over currently serves as a member of PEPFAR’s Scientific Advisory Board and as a member of the Steering Committee of the HIV/AIDS modeling consortium funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
After leaving college, Over served in the US Peace Corps’ first program in Burkina Faso, where he worked with villagers in the construction of 25 water wells. While earning his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he spent one year as a Foreign Scholar in the Economics Department of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). After leaving Madison, he taught health economics, development economics, applied microeconomics and econometrics as an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and the Center for Development at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts from 1975 through 1981 and as an Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University from 1981 through 1985, where he also held the position of Associate Professor of Public Health.
Recruited to the World Bank as a Health Economist in 1986, Mead Over advanced to the position of Lead Health Economist in the Development Research Group, before leaving the World Bank to join the Center for Global Development in 2006. Each spring since 2005, he has taught a module on “Modeling the Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions against Infectious Diseases” as part of the master’s degree program in health economics for developing countries at the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Développement International (CERDI) at the University of the Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
More From Mead Over
August 15, 2011
Publication
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.
July 6, 2011
Blog Post
This blog was co-authored with Orin Levine, Executive Director, International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and it will be cross-posted on his Huffington Post blog at www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-orin-levine
In low- and middle-income countries, children living in poverty are much less likely to be vaccinated and more likely to die or become ill from a vaccine-preventable disease than better-off children. An example comes from Nigeria, where less than 5% of children in the lowest quintile of the wealth distribution were fully vaccinated in 2003, as opposed to 40% of children in the wealthiest quintile. (For more on inequalities in health, see here)
May 17, 2011
Blog Post
What if by taking a pill every day, all 33 million HIV-infected people in the world could not only fend off the deter
February 11, 2011
Blog Post
I am one of four panelists who will debate on Monday morning whether it is ethical for a government to offer material
February 4, 2011
Blog Post
In February 2010, we wrote about how the relative magnitude of the death toll from the Haiti earthquake, then reckoned at approximately 230,000, compared to other recent natural disasters. On the one year anniversary of the earthquake, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive announced that a year’s worth of recovery efforts had provided a revised death toll of 316,000, representing nearly 3.5% of Haiti’s total population (a comparable disaster in the United States would kill 10.5 million people). Death tolls from such extensive natural disasters are subject to uncertainty, but it appears the last event that definitively exceeds the toll from the Haiti earthquake was Cyclone Bhola, which struck East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1970, killing as many as 500,000. Considering these numbers, the 2010 Haiti earthquake was the most deadly natural disaster of the last forty years.
February 4, 2011
Blog Post
Pages
May 6, 2009
Blog Post
September 21, 2012
Blog Post
As the Global Fund’s November board meeting approaches – where the future of the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria (AMFm) hangs in the balance – there is much anxiety that AMFm will be terminated in 2013. The reason for such anxiety is clear: no donors have pledged funding commitments for after December 2012. But there’s another elephant in the room: the US government’s apparent lack of support, particularly its legislated “opt-in” stance on AMFm: “the Global Fund should not support activities involving the ‘Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria’ or similar entities pending compelling evidence of success from pilot programs as evaluated by the Coordinator of United States Government Activities to Combat Malaria Globally.” (Conversely, an opt-out stance would be to support AMFm unless no compelling evidence is presented.) This very specific and strict provision makes the AMFm’s continued survival all but impossible without an explicit endorsement by US Global Malaria Coordinator (currently Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer) who leads the US President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) housed in the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
February 11, 2011
Blog Post
I am one of four panelists who will debate on Monday morning whether it is ethical for a government to offer material
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