US Triples Medical Aid to Poorest Countries

President Bush yesterday signed a bill into law that will triple the amount of funding America sends to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in the world’s poorest countries. This is one of the things the administration has got right in the last eight years. Moreover, the new bill drops some of the restrictions on the funds, such as teaching abstinence and a ban on HIV positive travelers to the US. This is the America the world used to know.

The White House, ever self-congratulatory (but in this case, rightly so), issued a statement that said the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR] was “the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history. When the president launched this initiative in 2003, about 50,000 people in all of sub-Saharan Africa were receiving anti-retroviral treatment. Today, PEPFAR supports lifesaving anti-retroviral treatment for nearly 1.7 million people in the region - and tens of thousands more around the world, from Asia to eastern Europe.”

Eric Friedman, the Physicians for Human Rights’ (PHR) senior global health policy advisor, was elated about lifting the travel ban, which he said has “been an embarrassment to this country for many years” He added, the legislation was “the boldest act of any wealthy nation in ameliorating Africa's disastrous health worker shortage.” The funds will create 140,000 jobs in the sector according to Dr. Friedman

The gay rights group Human Rights Campaign agreed. Its president, Joe Solmonese, stated “We appreciate the president signing the repeal of this unjust and sweeping policy that deems HIV-positive individuals inadmissible to the United States. The HIV travel and immigration ban performs no public health service, is unnecessary and ineffective.”

As regular readers will know, this journal has argued that malaria is too easy and cheap to prevent and to treat for it to kill 1 million people each year. The World Health Organization estimates that deaths due to the mosquito-born disease cut more than a full percentage point from the annual economic growth of the most affected nations. Preventing those deaths for a few dollars a person will make their nations richer.

As for TB, WHO estimated that there were 14.4 million cases of tuberculosis worldwide in 2006 according to a report that came out in March of this year. Some 700,000 of them also had HIV AIDS. With the rise of anti-biotic resistant strains of TB, containing and curing the disease has become harder, and extra funding is welcome.

Three cheers for Congress and President Bush! One only wishes there were more occasions to write that here.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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