Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
OG, are you suggesting Dave Snyder, spokesman for U.S.-based agency Catholic Relief Services and quoted in the CNN article is lying? And giving the numbers for one agency doesn't really tell us anything additionally it is 2005 so how much money has been diverted to Tsunami relief?
Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
No, I am saying that he was misquoted, did not have his facts straight, or was refering to other funding sources, not the US Government. The Annual reports I cited are directly from the Catholic Relief Web site.
Obviously he has seen huge increases over the last couple of years in his funding from the US government. Those are the facts.
Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
You gave 2004 figures not 2005.
Re: Bush’s AIDS relief promises and the reality…
Great and it’s not enough, that’s the whole point of this thread.
Re: Bush’s AIDS relief promises and the reality…
2005 are not available, and the American goevenment operates on a Sept 30 fiscal year. However Catholic Relief appears to be swimming in funds:
CRS so far has received more than $126 million in donations, allowing the agency to expand original program plans of $80 million to $150 million. Although CRS raised its long-term rebuilding plans above what it has so far collected, the agency is confident there will be sufficient private and U.S. government funds to cover program costs over the next five years.
http://www.catholicrelief.org/about_us/newsroom/press_releases/releases.cfm?ID=273
No it is not the point of the whole thread. There is a limited ability of the medical infrastructure to absorb new money. You can have all the money in the world and if your caregivers never existed, are dying, or are fleeing, you can wave around whatever money you want. This frickin’ problem has gotten so bad it may not be solved. You can throw all of the money in the world at it, and you will not stop it. Believe me, every epidemiologist in the world would be advocate spending huge money now if they thought it would stop the disease in it’s tracks. By spending more money now you would spend exponentially less in future years. But if you cannot absorb the money, it does you no good.
You can spend all the money in the world on an ace reliever. But if you put him in the game with 2 outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth every time he is still not going to win many games. It is not a function of money. Unless you want to mobiliize 5% of the worlds caregivers and send them to Africa, you will not get ahead. Your boy Clinton could have spent a tenth of the amount now required, and gotten 100 times the result.
Re: Bush’s AIDS relief promises and the reality…
Nice choice of words. As the article states, those funds are for countires affected by the Tsunami not Africa.
Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
I get frustrated at politicizing a scientific problem. This is not about Bush. It is about a continent whose people refuse to change their behavior. About corrupt governments who have their heads in the sand, and about political bickering when action, any action is better than further delay.
I truely believe that this is an infection that no matter what is done now cannot be stopped, barring a miracle. It will have to burn itself out, taking millions with it. That is why the Gates foundation is now focusing on other regions such as India and China, because the cahnces are less than 25% that Africa can avoid a catastrophe of biblical proportions.
Re: Bush’s AIDS relief promises and the reality…
OG generalizing an entire continent now, what’s up?
I’m surprise you have such a problem with increased spending in Africa, after all Bush drops $200 billion in Iraq and I haven’t heard a peep. You don’t really buy that “fighting for your freedom” bit do you?
Besides that it’s not time to pull the plug on Africa yet…
… there is some cause for hope. There is evidence that HIV prevalence rates are declining in countries that have aggressively introduced education and awareness campaigns. For instance, in South Africa, HIV prevalence rates for pregnant women under 20, fell to 15.4% in 2001, down from 21% in 1998. A decline in HIV prevalence has also been detected among young inner-city women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, and Uganda.
Re: Bush’s AIDS relief promises and the reality…
There is a very good summary here:
http://www.unaids.org/wad2004/EPIupdate2004_html_en/epi04_05_en.htm#TopOfPage
Sub-Saharan Africa has just over 10% of the world’s population, but is home to more than 60% of all people living with HIV—some 25.4 million [23.4 million–28.4 million]. In 2004, an estimated 3.1 million [2.7 million–3.8 million] people in the region became newly infected, while 2.3 million [2.1 million–2.6 million] died of AIDS. Among young people aged 15–24 years, an estimated 6.9% [6.3–8.3%] of women and 2.2% [2.0–2.7%] of men were living with HIV at the end of 2004.
Adult HIV prevalence has been roughly stable in recent years. But stabilization does not necessarily mean the epidemic is slowing. On the contrary, it can disguise the worst phases of an epidemic—when roughly equally large numbers of people are being newly infected with HIV and are dying of AIDS.
I have absolutely no problem spending whatever is necessary. You miss the point again. You could spend the entire GDP and still not solve the problem. Take a look at figure 8 in the above report (it’s too big to import), and ask yourself when the right time to act would have been.
As far as a decline in AIDS rates for preganant women, that is cold comfort. By now so many children are BORN with AIDS that they die before reaching child bearing age. One look at the decline in life expectancy shows that there are fewer people living shorter lives. The ones left include the sexually less active older people, as well as a huge population of orphans.
[thumb=H]africa7554_9633726.JPG[/thumb]
In some of the hardest hit countries the life expectancy is now 33 years. At some point there are just not enough well people to produce food, and famine sets in. When people have too few calories, they are victims of secondary disease and infection. This is starting to be seen in scattered areas.
Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
Here is an interesting update. I think this authors optimism is a bit misplaced. He can begin to celebrate when new infections are less than deaths. But it sort of pokes a hole in the perception that money is not "on the ground" in Africa.
In Africa, Life After AIDS
E-Mail This
Printer-Friendly
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 9, 2005
Windhoek, Namibia
Bobwalla is a black woman born in Cape Town and raised under apartheid. She lived in a shack with her husband, who drank and beat her for the first nine years of their marriage. Then she tested positive for H.I.V., and cried for days. It was a death sentence.
But she was lucky enough to find a clinic that could give her antiretroviral drugs. She persuaded her husband, who is also H.I.V.-positive, to get treatment. He stopped drinking as part of the treatment, and has stopped abusing her and sleeping around. Now she counsels pregnant women on how not to pass H.I.V. on to their babies.
"For some, H.I.V. brings death," she says. "For me, H.I.V. brought life into my home."
You come to Southern Africa to visit AIDS hospitals, and you expect, or at least I expected, to find unrelieved sadness. But something positive has happened recently because of the confluence of three factors. The first is the spread of antiretroviral treatment programs. Second, some African governments have gone on the offensive against the disease. And third, the U.S. and other countries are pouring in money to pay for treatments.
So now you run across health workers who have been laboring for years and watching people die, but who suddenly have the means to offer life. You have, amid the ocean of despair, this archipelago of hope, hospitals that are ramping up treatment programs as fast as they can, even while bursting out of their walls. In Namibia, for example, only 500 people were receiving treatment in January 2004. Now over 9,000 people are, and the number is rising rapidly.
Here in Windhoek, Namibia's capital, you run into people like a 6-year-old who was born to parents who were both H.I.V.-positive. They gave her the name Haunapawa, which reflected their mood at the time. It means, "There is no good in the world." But the parents are both still alive, and the girl, once racked by pneumonia, is thriving on the medicine.
You run into scenes like the one I saw at Oshakati Hospital in northern Namibia, by the Angolan border, where a young Zimbabwean doctor, Gram Mutandi, works at his clinic. Patients can wait for eight hours to receive treatment and counseling.
One woman, Josephina, had been dying of AIDS. Her mother had already died. So had her sister and brother-in-law, and she was looking after their children. Then she got on the treatment program, and now she has the irrepressible joy of someone who has come back from death.
Next to her was a woman who showed a photograph of herself at the depths of her disease, frail and emaciated. With treatment, she's robust now. "I want to thank Dr. Mutandi," she said. "You saved my life."
You can imagine what this has done for the morale of the health workers. You can imagine how it has helped them in their efforts to get more people tested for H.I.V. Now a positive test is not a death sentence. Something can be done.
Obviously there's a long way to go. You can still go out and visit children in mud huts who are raising themselves because their parents, aunts and uncles are all dead. Only a small fraction of those who need treatment are getting it. At the Lutheran Hospital in Onandjokwe, Namibia, the staff tested 858 women in the first quarter of this year, but could get only five of their male partners to even come in for testing.
**But there's something perversely akin here to Silicon Valley in the early 1990's. All these little treatment facilities are trying to get really big really fast. Thanks in part to American money, they're building new wings and desperately scrounging for qualified staff.
They're facing the problems start-ups face: how to offer treatment to hundreds when you have only one sink and one phone, how to use the survivors who suddenly have the rest of their lives to lead.
I came here expecting despair, but now realize that we should be redoubling our efforts out of a sense of opportunity. I came here aware of controversies about abstinence versus condoms in AIDS prevention programs, about U.S. aid versus multilateral aid, and now realize that all that nonsense is irrelevant on the ground.
This is a world of people trying everything, of doctors from Russia, Egypt, Cuba, Germany and Zimbabwe. Many are backed by money from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, finally doing the work they've always dreamed of doing. **
We could be on the verge of a recovery boom.
Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
That is good news but you still seem confused as far as the financial aid situation in Africa and how badly money is needed and is in fact in short supply.
I'm sure you read recently that this week Blair and Bush talked on the subject matter in which Bush announced an additional $674 million in aid in response to the humanitarian emergencies in Africa, not as much as much as Blair wanted but emergency funding none-the-less, this alone should tell you that additional aid is needed, what further proof do you need OG?
Re: Bush's AIDS relief promises and the reality...
UTD, I don't get it. In the beginning you post that Bush isn't doing enough, then you post he is giving out an additional $674 million.
My points are:
1) you could spend the whole frickin GDP and you might not solve much.
2) Bush has made the worlds largest commitment to AIDS relief.
3) I think practical problems on the ground are the bottle neck, not the funding.
4) Clinton blew it, because the epidemic was out of control by the year 2000, and expenditures will be exponentially higher now, compared to the opportunity thoughout the 90's.
5) Much of the emergency relief is for side effects of Aids, such as poor harvests because of a lack of workers. These secondary effects could have been avoided if large scale action had been take much earlier.
6) Ignorance, incompetance, corruption, slowness and denial have been as big a set of barriers as the liberal touchstones of funding and medicine. The arguement over absinence is a red herring, but ANY epidemiologist will tell you that sex is the vector, and until behaviors change the epidemic will speed ahead.
7) It is entirely possible that we have not yet seen the very worst of this disease. The melt down scenario is that the AIDS virus mutates and becomes drug resistant. If drugs are not employed strictly, but flung around without sticking to a precise treatment plan, a much worse bug could appear. This is not just science fiction. AIDS mutates quickly. If the infrastucture for treatment is not inplace before drugs are prescribed, then the world is just asking for this to happen. The worst case is that an AIDS virus that is spread though much more casual contact could erupt. That is why it is important to take things sequentially and not to throw money and drugs at the problem. We are talking about billions of deaths if this worst case erupts....
Re: Bush’s AIDS relief promises and the reality…
This action was taken after this thread was started and like Tony Blair I agree it’s not enough.
Or it might? I’m not suggesting you spend the whole GDP though.
Approved by Democrates as well, this isn’t coming out of Bush’s pocket.
Well evidently the infrastructure on the ground needs funding hence emergency funding approval and new funds to build further infrastructure to help with the crisis are in dire need, while there maybe trouble spots there are many more spots in African ready and in need of additional aid.
You hate to politicize the AIDS problem right 
. Anyway let’s bust the balls since you have put them out there. Bill Clinton demanded that a bill that provided more foreign aid be sent to him, Republicans refused so your attempt to Bash Clinton has failed if you go back and look at the facts, nice attempt though.
I agree and you can read my response above and we can argue about the past or debate about the present and future.
And to change behaviors you need education centers which require funding and the abstinence only programs is not a red herring, if you change sexual behavior in which condoms are used then the spread of AIDS would drop dramatically, instead abstinence only programs speed up the spreading of the virus by taking away funds that teach safe sex methods.
Setting up education centers and safe sex education centers cost money and those are needed to help headoff the above scenario, that said those already with AIDS need facilities that provided them relief so they needn’t suffer more so.