Budget Deal Reached on Global Health Programs and Needle Exchange Ban

Lawmakers have finalized the fiscal year 2010 budget for foreign assistance, setting funding for key programs to fight global HIV and TB and reaching a landmark deal to revise the needle-exchange ban.
The agreement—expected to pass the House before the end of this week and the Senate before the end of next week—includes some modest increases [...]

Read Full Post »

ID Doc Writes About the Power of Foreign Aid

In an op-ed published this weekend by the Concord Monitor, Dr. Jodie Dionne-Odom, an IDSA member who has been working with the Center for Global Health Policy to boost support for US global AIDS and TB programs, recounted her first-hand experience seeing the power of PEPFAR at work in Africa.
“The program has accomplished much more [...]

Read Full Post »

Kazatchkine Enters Fray of Health Systems vs. Global AIDS Debate

Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said that the Fund and PEPFAR are probably the most significant players in efforts to strengthening health systems.
Speaking after an International AIDS Society workshop on the impact of HIV program on health systems, Kazatchkine sought to counter arguments that HIV programs undermine [...]

Read Full Post »

Global Health & the G8 Summit

The Group of 8 Summit has not gotten underway yet (the official kick-off is tomorrow), but we already have a little bit of global health-related news, via to David Olson, the Global Health Council’s Director of Policy Communications.
Olson is liveblogging here from the G8 meeting and in his first post, he reports that a delegation [...]

Read Full Post »

Key Decision on TB and AIDS Funding Looms in the U.S. House

Editor’s Note: We will be blogging today about the House Appropriations subcommittee meeting, filing an update on funding levels for global health programs. So check back to see what happens!
At last week’s HIV/AIDS Implementers’ Meeting in Namibia, participants expressed deep concern about the commitment among donor nations to maintaining the momentum in the global fight against [...]

Read Full Post »

The 63 Billion Dollar Question

This week the Obama Administration seemed to take a page from George Bush’s old playbook as the new Administration announces a very big sounding figure, $63 billion, for global health programs that help poor countries — when, in fact, the proposal obscures the real facts about the Obama budget, especially for FY 2010.

Read Full Post »

Two Tales on TB

Two troubling TB stories this morning:
First, a study in the Lancet reports that MDR-TB is an increasing threat in the former Soviet Union and China.
“The countries of the former Soviet Union are facing a serious and widespread epidemic with the highest prevalence of MDR-TB ever reported in 13 years of global data collection,” the study [...]

Read Full Post »

Nothing to sneeze at

It’s not enough, but Congress did provide a small surprise boost in bilateral TB funding for this fiscal year-padding the FY09 appropriations bill with an extra $7.5 million for combating global tuberculosis.
Overall, the bill includes $162.5 million for global TB, a little more than the $155 million global HIV/AIDS & TB advocates had anticipated. That’s [...]

Read Full Post »