Opportunities for Presidential Leadership on AIDS: From an "Emergency Plan" to a Sustainable Policy

Publication Date: September 2008

Publisher: Center for Global Development

Author(s): Mead Over

Research Area: Health; International relations

Keywords: Presidential transition; HIV/AIDS; Foreign Aid

Type: Brief

Coverage: United States

Abstract:

This White House and the World Brief presents the key facts and recommendations drawn from Chapter Eleven of The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President.

U.S. spending on global AIDS is widely seen as a significant foreign policy and humanitarian success, but this success contains the seeds of a future crisis. Treatment costs are set to escalate dramatically and new HIV infections continue to outpace the number of people receiving treatment. Three bad options thus loom ahead for U.S. foreign policy: indefinitely increase foreign assistance spending on an open-ended commitment, eliminate half of other foreign aid programs, or withdraw the medicine that millions of people depend upon to stay alive. CGD senior fellow Mead Over provides another option: implementing a sustainable policy that concentrates on prevention in order to drastically cut new infections while sustaining the reduction in AIDS-related deaths.