(Re-post from last year but relevant to this week's discussion!)
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reports a gloomy view on the war on AIDS. War on AIDS
Several of the arguments used seem straightforward in hindsight: there was way too much emphasis on treatment and very little on prevention. With scarce resources (this includes "celebrity capital" to champion a cause), even if the expansion of treatment manages to slow down growth in prevalence rates, it is not surprising that many poor countries are incapable of providing treatment to all those infected. As treatment expansion rates are lower than the rates of new infections, most countries are now in a difficult position of having to ration life-saving treatments.
Earlier in the term we discussed the political economy of global health policies and how this can distort the allocation of resources both between diseases (eg: malaria, AIDS, diarrhea) and between preventive and curative approaches.
Why has it been so difficult to allocate resources to preventive care in HIV-AIDS in order to address the real source of the problem?
I just came across a paper from the Center for Global Development which finds that scaling up access to antiretroviral therapy in Mozambique seems to have led to riskier sexual behavior, thus more infections (basically, supporting the argument from the posted WSJ article on the case of Uganda). Just thought I would share it for those interested :-)
ReplyDeleteIngrid
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424741/?utm_source=nl_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_weekly_01182011&