President’s Emergency AIDS Plan Saved 1.2 Million in Africa
By Marilyn Chase
April 6 (Bloomberg) -- The largest U.S. foreign aid program fighting the AIDS epidemic has cut the disease’s death toll by 1.2 million from 2004 to 2007 in a dozen hard-hit African countries, researchers said.
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by President George W. Bush in 2003, lowered the AIDS death rate on average by 10.5 percent a year in those countries, said study author Eran Bendavid of Stanford University in a study published online today in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The program’s benefits didn’t extend to preventing new infections or lowering overall prevalence of the AIDS virus.
The largest single U.S. foreign aid program for health in history, the PEPFAR program has invested most of its $18.8 billion to date in treatment for people already infected by the AIDS virus. The relief plan devoted a smaller share to prevention programs that often focused on sexual abstinence.
“Treatment has worked,” said Bendavid, a fellow in infectious diseases and health policy, in an interview. The challenge now is to make prevention “a serious component of the program in the next five years,” he added.
The epidemic has left 33 million people sickened by AIDS or infected with the virus, HIV or human immunodeficiency virus. Congress reauthorized the AIDS relief program in July 2008, boosting funding to $48 billion through 2013, broadening its disease targets to include tuberculosis and malaria and removing the focus on sexual abstinence. Plans are under way to expand recipients from the original list of 15 countries.
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