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Bono Made Bill Frist Cry, too! – 2008 Elections and Child Survival

In homage to a paper I wrote on the Jubilee 2000 campaign, a colleague of mine sent me this article in the Times about Bill Frist, the former Tennessee Senator and ex Repub majority leader, who is leading a new initiative to seek more U.S. funding for child survival. Frist, as you know, is a […]

Cost-Benefit, Oster, and AIDS

Picking up the theme Ben mentioned earlier, economist Emily Oster suggests (see our prior blog post here) that exports helped determine the rate of diffusion of AIDS in Uganda. As prices of Ugandan coffee exports declined, men had less pocket money which made it harder for them to have more sexual partners. This view actually […]

U.S. AIDS funding disbursement gap

Jennifer Kates of the Kaiser Family Foundation and her collaborators found that in 2006, the U.S. promised much more for global AIDS funding than it disbursed for the second year in a row. In fact, the U.S. only disbursed 56% of bilateral funds that were promised. In 2006, the U.S. committed $2,362.8mn but only disbursed […]

Easterly’s review of Helen Epstein’s new book

Bill Easterly has a review of Helen Epstein’s new book in the New York Review of Books. (This follows another largely favorable review in the New York Times). The New York Review has been a frequent outlet of her work which we have written about. Her book summarizes a lot of her pathbreaking reporting on […]

Bush Administration to fund male circumcision

We’ve post on this before, but male circumcision is getting more support from the Bush Administration as a prevention strategy in the fight against AIDS (see here and here). From today’s Washington Post: Circumcision funding would be small at first, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for individual countries. The cells in […]

So much for not breastfeeding…

Turns out that it is better if kids get breastmilk, even if their mothers are HIV positive, as they are more likely to die from diarrhea than they are of contracting HIV. Here is a link to the story in the Washington Post and excerpt from the Kaiser summary report. Providing infant formula to HIV-positive […]

Franklin Graham video

Here is a short video of Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse, on a medical mission to treat people with HIV. Interesting to see religious groups in the field. This is from February 2007. While these groups get quite a lot of criticism as recipients of federal largesse under PEPFAR (see also this Boston Globe […]

Obama, Rick Warren video

In case you missed coverage of Obama at Rick Warren’s conference late last year. I’m going to be posting links to videos in the coming days in part for a class I’m teaching at UT in the fall.

Prevention is not working

I’ve written about this before, but it seems to me the recent surge in interest in male circumcision emanates from the recognition that prevention programs are hard. It is simply very difficult to change human behavior and insist that men wear condoms, cut down on the number of sexual partners, or that women and men […]

Male circumcision as foreign policy

The Council on Foreign Relations held its first of several rounds on the role of health technologies in US foreign policy. Laurie Garrett led the discussion with Ambassador Mark Dybul and New York Health Commissioner Tom Frieden. The full video is available on the CFR site. I’d be curious to hear what others think but […]