On the HIV/AIDS front, news has been coming fast and furiously this week and last, as the United Nations conducts its High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, South Africa hosts its HIV/AIDS conference in Durban and the media takes the opportunity to commorate the 30-year anniversary of the global fight against AIDS. I thought I’d link to a few of the most interesting articles to emerge in the last few days:
Last week, the Washington Post published an article about HIV/AIDS funding, asking, quite provocatively “How many people do we want to save from a death by AIDS — and who’s going to pay for it?” The article gives short-shrift to the treament-as-prevention campaigners, perpetuating the false dichotomy that a dollar for treatment is a dollar less for prevention. But make sure and read to the very end, where the article discusses some of the interesting proposals for “innovative financing” of HIV treatment.
Early this week, Nobel-prize winner Francoise Barre-Sinoussi had an opinion piece in the New York Times that clearly articulates the need for an HIV cure, the barriers that have faced researchers until now, and some of the most promising developments that have occurred recently.
Perhaps most interestingly, a venerable group has published a new proposed framework for AIDS investment in the Lancet. The pre-released online article argues that the current methodogy for projecting funding needs for HIV/AIDS is too silo’ed and doesn’t capture efficiencies that are gained across programmatic activities. The article details a new framework for projecting the necessary investment for the next ten years.
Meanwhile, on the blogger front, Mead Over stays on his prevention soapbox; Laurie Garrett and Larry Kramer at CFR and GMHC respectively tell the riveting story of the discovery of HIV; and Dr. Gitau Mburu at Global Health Magazine reflects on what we’ve learned from the HIV/AIDS response that applies to global health overall.
It’s one of those weeks where my Google Reader is chock-a-block with interesting finds – happy reading!