Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Ruth has posted her commentary on Warren Buffett's donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over at Views from the Center. There is also an excellent round-up of the press coverage here.
Hagiographic analysis in the Washington Post of Bill Gates's decision to retire from Microsoft and spend more time with his money:
Even as Microsoft is grappling with a changing competitive environment in which the software that Gates championed is losing ground to Internet-based services, the foundation is facing hurdles that observers say only Gates may be able to clear.
In a controversial new study presented at the ongoing PEPFAR conference in Durban and reported in Wednesday's Boston Globe, researchers at ORC Macro have concluded that wealthy people (the top quintile) in Africa are infected with HIV/AIDS at higher rates than poorer people. These finding contradict widely held beliefs and undermine the notion that poverty is a main driver of AIDS.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: increasing demand raises prices. And yet the Joint Declaration on the International Drug Purchase Facility - UNITAID issued by Brazil, Chile, France and Norway at the launch of UNITAID on June 2nd explicitly includes the following contradictory principles of the new entity:
This morning, First Lady Laura Bush hosted a press conference to discuss the successes and next steps for the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI). According to the USAID press release, the malaria initiative is a $1.2 billion, five-year effort that was launched last year in three countries (Angola, Tanzania and Uganda) and will soon be expanded to include four more: Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda and Senegal.
On June 5th, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a five-year, $27.8 million grant to PATH for program research in India, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam intended to inform country decisions about HPV vaccine introduction to prevent cervical cancer. PATH will help plan for and pilot introduction in the four countries, with the goal of informing regional and global vaccine introduction efforts and international financing plans.
The World Health Assembly (the governing body of the WHO) has agreed to launch a working group on research and development, to promote R&D aimed at diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries. The decision represents a compromise between two apparently contradictory positions.
The new resolution (A59/A/Conf. Paper No 8) encourages member states:
According to today’s New York Times, UNAIDS officials have estimated that stopping the HIV/AIDS pandemic will require $22 billion annually by 2008, and perhaps more in subsequent years. Of this $22 billion, $11 billion will be needed for prevention efforts, and $5.5 billion for care and treatment of infected people, with the rest used to support program costs and efforts to support orphans and vulnerable children.
The World Bank recently published Health Financing Revisited: A Practitioners Guide (PDF), by Pablo Gottret and George Schieber. In his foreword, Jacques Baudouy offers the following summary:
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