The United States says it will concentrate its resources on 13 countries with high levels of HIV that have the best chance of controlling the AIDS epidemic under a strategy unveiled on Tuesday.
Those countries include Kenya, Zambia, United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho, Ivory Coast, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Haiti and Rwanda.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson outlined the priorities of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR, a cornerstone of U.S. global health assistance, which supports HIV/AIDS treatment, testing and counseling for millions of people worldwide.
President Donald Trump’s administration requested the program be cut by $1 billion earlier this year but the Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week to keep funding largely unchanged at roughly $6 billion.
“The Trump Administration remains deeply committed to the global HIV/AIDS response and to demonstrating clear outcomes and impact for every U.S. dollar spent,” Tillerson said in the report.
The administration did not disclose which programs were being cut, but the State Department has stressed that it will continue offering treatment to people who are already receiving it.
PEPFAR will continue to operate programs in more than 50 countries. To maximize its impact, however, it will focus much of its efforts on 13 countries that are nearing epidemic control – the point where there are more deaths each year from AIDS than there are new HIV infections.
“We’ve really focused on accelerating in these countries that we can get over the finish line, together with communities and governments,” Ambassador Deborah Birx, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, said in a telephone interview.
The work would be done in collaboration with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNAIDS, and others.
Five of the target countries – Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe – are already nearing control of their HIV epidemics, based on national surveys from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Columbia University and local governmental and non-governmental partners.
Last May, Republicans balked at the Trump administration’s proposed $5 billion budget for PEPFAR, a $1 billion cut from the current budget of $6 billion.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last week warned that even modest cuts in HIV/AIDS funding could reverse dramatic gains in curbing the global AIDS epidemic.
In the past five or six years, presidents have proposed PEPFAR cuts and Congress, which controls the budget, has restored the funding, Birx said.
This is good news. Zambia is on the right track. I am happy to hear that its nearing HIV epidermic control levels.With the new government policy of test ad treat, we will surely save a lot of lives.
Zambia will triumph and Trump will be infected by one of his many foreign chicks!
I do not think this inference about these countries is correct. That there are MORE people dying of AIDS than there are new infections in these countries is just a confounder, a mirage created by the interference of poverty and hunger related diseases which result in premature deaths in the HIV affected people. In other words, without these poverty related health conditions, there would be LESS people dying of AIDS than there are new HIV infections. This is a crude quasi-scientific measurement if you ask me