AIDS War Falling Apart, and more

A few items of note that I read over the course of last week:

• Last Sunday, the New York Times published an article, “At Front Lines, AIDS War is Falling Apart”, causing a spate of emails and exchanges across the HIV/AIDS world.  The article cited the funding cuts that I discussed in the round-up two weeks back, and cited flatlining budgets as cause for turning people away from treatment and thereby reversing the decade-long fight against AIDS.

• Mead Over at the Center for Global Development writes an excellent counter-piece, taking the line that, while cuts are a setback, to claim that the war is falling apart overstates the success of efforts until now.  He argues that real success would be lower infection rates rather than more people on treatment.  Over’s post should be read in conjunction with Gregg Gonsalve’s comments and Bill Easterly’s rebuttal here.

• Stuart Rennie, on his Global Bioethics Blog, applies this same thinking to the recent protests by AIDS activists who are challenging the Obama administration’s funding commitments to HIV/AIDS programming, which is less than promised in last year’s re-up of PEPFAR.  He calls the historical funding of treatment programs “Frankenstenian” in their “untenable” reliance on foreign funding to keep people alive on treatment.

• The HIV/AIDS funding debate is even more interesting in the context of the greater foreign assistance debate raging at the State Department.  Foreign Policy‘s posting of a leaked National Security Council document, “A New Way Forward on Global Development“, internally known as PSD-7, poses the possibility that authority of global development funding could be taken away from the State Department and handed to an inter-agency coordinating body.

• Jean-Paul Chretien at Change.org gives an interesting analysis of the leaked document, outlining the implications of the new policy direction for  global health.  He purports that the new strategic focus on systems, country alignment and more rigorous funding allocation is a sign that the Obama administration is putting a higher strategic importance on development.