Why Won’t AIDS Donors Confirm Their Best New Hope for Avoiding Future Treatment Costs

via Center for Global Development, by Mead Over

Celia Dugger must have known she would get a reaction.  She called from South Africa last week with the surprising news that a donor meeting in South Africa had failed to come up with the $100 million necessary to complete the preparatory research on microbicides as an HIV prevention tool for women.  Luckily for me, she considered my spontaneous reaction to be unprintable and persisted until she got a more coherent quote from me, a quote that appears in her succinct and informative New York Times article here.

Why so emotional?  I’ve spent the last few months estimating the billions of annual dollars required to keep alive the four-million-and-counting patients whom the US and others are supporting now on AIDS treatment.  And I’ve been projecting the hundreds of billions the US and other donors will have to spend over coming decades to sustain these patients and to expand AIDS treatment access to even a small share of the unmet need for it.  The idea that these SAME donors would balk at a mere $100 million to confirm that microbicides really work is astonishing.

Read the rest.