peripheries

Antiretrovirals (red)uced

(c) peripheries

The Times reports on the latest media coup from Bono’s PRODUCT(RED): a digital music service to help Africa pay for antiretroviral medicines.

“The still-unnamed service, which is scheduled to start in September, will deliver customers three new pieces of exclusive content a week for a monthly fee of $5. Half of that money will go through (RED) to the Global Fund, and the other half will go to the artists who contribute songs and to their record companies.”

U2, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Elton John are amongst some of the “superstar acts” who will receive half of the money (they may be established an famous but there are huge costs associated with the life-style of a star).

Time for a back of the envelope calculation.

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A question of priority: Hunger or Climate Change?

When it comes to value for money, the Coppenhagen Consensus has always been known for going against the consensus. Organised by Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial statistician author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It the panel of economists behind the Coppenhagen Consensus have long identified HIV has the major threat for mankind.

This year, the eight leading economists, including five Nobel laureates, have identified malnutrition as the world’s major priority for aid and development, and ranked climate change at the bottom of their list of priority. I tend to agree that when it comes to effective measures in “resources-limited settings” (read our world) as they say in the UN lingo, Bjorn and the Copenhagen Consensus have a very good point.

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