The President's trip to Africa has put US HIV/AIDS assistance in the papers quite a bit. Last week the LA Times wrote this article praising the program and describing the experience before and after PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in one Kenyan village. It's a nice article, even if it is editorially inconsistent with the paper's coverage of the Gates Foundation.
As this Op/Ed points out, the article failed to mention the many controversies surrounding PEPFAR. Those mentioned in the Op/Ed are that in the early years PEPFAR would only pay for brand name drugs, and that a signficant percentage of the prevention funds are still dedicated to abstinence programs. I’m personally not a fan of these requirements either. There are surely times to use abstinence messaging, or to at least delay sexual debut, but it would be preferable to let these decisions be made on a case by case basis.
I do sometimes wonder, however, how much of this controversy is just that a lot of people really don't like the President or his faith-derived policies. If hypothetical President Gore had done the exact same thing, would people be this angry, or see it for what it is: a compromise to policy makers (and a lot of US voters) who are uncomfortable with HIV programming because they believe it implicitly accepts sex outside of marriage. Policies like the abstinence requirement got PEPFAR through a Repbulican administration and a Republican Congress. There aren't a lot of passing bills that don't include some sort of compromise.
