Integral Options Cafe: Bill Clinton's War on AIDS

Bill Clinton has a strong narcissistic streak and poor impulse control, but he is brilliant man with his heart in the right place. No matter what you think of Clinton the man, he has done more to prevent AIDS deaths in the past two or three years than any government has done since the crisis began.

Using his power as a former president and his ability to convince people to see things his way (this is where the narcissism comes in handy), Clinton (through his William J. Clinton Foundation) has made AIDS treatment available in more than 50 nations for less than $140 a year per person.

Clinton has a piece in the current Newsweek in which he describes his efforts to make AIDS a disease that no longer takes lives.

The face of AIDS treatment has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Before I was elected president, Hillary and I had close friends who had died of AIDS, and when I first got to the White House, there was little effective treatment for people living with the disease. By the start of my second term, the introduction of three-drug antiretroviral therapy had transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic illness for people who had access to the drugs. Treatment reduced AIDS-related mortality by nearly 80 percent in the United States. Unfortunately, almost no one could afford the drugs in Africa, where between 1992 and 2000 the number of HIV infections rose from 7 million to over 22 million.

When I left the White House, I wanted to do more to stem the number of deaths from AIDS in the developing world, especially in Africa, home to more than two thirds of the people with the virus, and in Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean, where HIV/AIDS was spreading rapidly. It was clear that the prices for medicines and tests, which fell substantially between 2000 and 2002, needed to come down even more. Under the leadership of Ira Magaziner, who worked with me in the White House on health care, generic pharmaceutical companies agreed to cut prices dramatically in the developing world in return for larger volumes and assistance to lower production costs. Generous commitments by Ireland, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia, France, the United Kingdom and private donors assured that the companies would be paid for growing volumes. For the 55 countries that have joined our procurement consortium, the annual price for the most common drug cocktail is now less than $140—an over 50 percent reduction from the lowest previous prices—and the cost of necessary tests to monitor a patient's response to treatment has fallen by as much as 80 percent. Other companies have lowered their prices in response to these cuts.

Lower prices and greater competition have increased the buying power of the new money invested by governments, foundations and international agencies. Overall, the number of people accessing treatment in the developing world has increased from less than 400,000 to over 1.3 million since the beginning of 2004; about 25 percent of those new recipients are receiving medicine through the contracts we negotiated. If all nations in the developing world were purchasing AIDS drugs at these prices, we could dramatically increase the number of lives saved for the same amount of money.

Integral Options Cafe

Pages

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Bill Clinton's War on AIDS

No comments:

Post a Comment