PEPFAR Status

Feb 8th, 2008 4:36 PM UTC
By Virginia Simmons

The AP ran an important story about PEPFAR (The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ) renewal this week.

Some excerpts:

“A five-year, $15 billion effort to combat AIDS in Africa and other areas — arguably the most important and popular international program of the Bush presidency — may become a political battleground as it comes up for renewal.

President Bush wants to double and House Democrats want to triple spending on a program that is now treating 1.4 million people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where he will visit in two weeks.

Democrats also want to slash spending on a multimillion-dollar component that emphasizes sexual abstinence. And that has conservative groups furious.”

also:

“Some experts also worry that high-profile AIDS programs will soak up too big a share of scarce health care dollars. “I’m hard pressed to think of anything in recorded history on the scale of it,” Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said of the AIDS initiative. “How do you target one disease without it being at the expense of other diseases?” she said, citing the pressing needs in Africa for maternal and child health care programs, clean water and sanitation efforts, and more health care training and infrastructure improvements.

U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul told the House Foreign Relations Committee last year that the AIDS money contributes, directly or indirectly, to a wide range of nutrition, TB, malaria, women’s health, clean water and education programs.”

Read the full article here.

-Virginia Simmons

TAGS: PEPFAR