A response to IRIN/PlusNews list of six potholes in the road to significantly increasing HIV treatment coverage in Africa.
1. Cost:
The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has estimated that US$ 28 billion to US$ 50 billion would be needed globally every year from 2010 to 2015 in order to progressively reach universal access targets for HIV/AIDS by 2015. One-third of this will contribute towards the cost of the drugs.
The figure may sound “staggering” but it needs to be put in perspective with a few other figures such as:

The cost of …

Back in January, I wrote a comment following Rick Rowden’s public launch at SOAS of his book “The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS”.  Today I open this blog to Rick who emailled me with the following response. I am still reading through Rick’s book and hope to come back to this issue very soon.
Dear peripheries:
Thanks you for covering the launch of my book at SOAS in London in January. I appreciate your attempt to review my book before reading …

Anthony Fauci, NIAID Director, speaks on the accomplishments and futures challenges of HIV/AIDS research

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Treatment as a means to prevent HIV infection has hit the media following a declaration by Brian Williams, professor of epidemiology at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch, at the AAAS in San Diego.
Whilst the HIV epidemic has shown some signs of stabilisation in the recent years, more than 7,000 people are still infected every day with the virus that causes AIDS.
Despite interesting results of a vaccine trial in Thailand, prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not …

And would alternative policies deliver in the fight against HIV/AIDS?
This is what Rick Rowden, Senior Policy Analyst at ActionAid International USA, puts forward in his book “The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS”.

I have not read the book yet but went to the recent UK launch organised by the publisher Zed at the SOAS in London. I can only report on my first impressions about the thesis that IMF policies, by constraining and limiting health policies and budgets in poor …