Politics and Policy of HIV/AIDS » Conference Ideas/Planning

Nov 29 World Affairs Council & Peace Corps panel “Stories from the Heart of a Pandemic”

Ben — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:43:11 +0000

For any readers in the Bay Area, the Peace Corps invites you to:

“Stories from the Heart of a Pandemic”
A panel in recognition of World AIDS Day

Wednesday, November 29, 6:30 to 8 p.m.
World Affairs Council Auditorium
312 Sutter Street, Second Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108 [map]

In recognition of World AIDS Day, a panel of former Peace Corps volunteers and a Peace Corps country director will share stories from the front lines of the global HIV/AIDS crisis. Worldwide, Peace Corps volunteers have reached nearly 900,000 people through their work on HIV/AIDS. Come learn how you, too, can make a difference as a Peace Corps volunteer. For more information, please contact PC recruiter Sean Kennedy, 510-637-1525 or skennedy@peacecorps.gov.

MORE INFORMATION:
This panel is one of many Peace Corps events taking place nationwide in recognition of World AIDS Day. Peace Corps has become an important force in the fight against HIV/AIDS because its volunteers live and work in some of the most impacted communities in the world. Peace Corps carries out HIV-related projects in every one of its partner countries in Africa and nearly half of its partner countries in the rest of the world. Worldwide, 20 percent of Peace Corps volunteers are assigned to projects in health and HIV/AIDS. Peace Corps volunteers do not provide direct medical care; rather, they help communities build their own capacity for prevention, care, and treatment. For example, Peace Corps volunteers train youth as peer educators. They work with community leaders to develop education materials. And they provide support to children orphaned by the disease. Worldwide, Peace Corps Volunteers have reached nearly 900,000 people through their work on HIV/AIDS.

And health volunteers are not the only ones making a difference. HIV/AIDS activities are woven into all Peace Corps programs – including business, agriculture, education and the environment. In a sense, ALL Peace Corps volunteers are HIV/AIDS volunteers, because they live as members of communities. Wherever the pandemic affects a coworker, neighbor or friend, a Peace Corps volunteer is working to fight the spread and stigma of AIDS.

Princeton HIV/AIDS Workshop May 5th

joshbusby — Mon, 08 May 2006 15:23:32 +0000

This past Friday, May 5th, a number of us academic-y types met a Princeton to discuss the “Politics and Policy of HIV/AIDS.” This day-long event was meant to bring those of us political scientists who write on HIV/AIDS together to discuss common challenges for studying this topic and to look for synergies in research strategies. Scholars included Evan Lieberman and Josh Busby of Princeton, Jessica Rich of Berkeley, Sue Peterson of the College of William and Mary, Susan Sell of George Washington University, and Nathan Paxton of Harvard. David Gartner, Policy Director of the Global AIDS Alliance, also joined us to provide a practitioner’s reflections on the topics. Andy Moravcsik and Jennifer Widner served as discussants on the papers.

We tried to address some of the major research topics in the field including:

why have some countries responded more vigorously to the pandemic in their country than others (Lieberman and Paxton write on this)
what are the effects of HIV/AIDS on national security (Peterson addresses this)
how has HIV/AIDS challenged contemporary models of global capitalism (Sell’s work on intellectual property rights gest at this)
how have NGOs reshaped the landscape for AIDS policy (Sell, Rich and Busby all get at this question)
why have some external donors been more responsive than others to the AIDS crisis (Busby writes on this question)

The papers are available temporarily for the event on the workshop website.

What is the state of our knowledge on these questions? Lieberman has found that increasing ethnic diversity in a country leads to a lower likelihood of government response. Paxton’s preliminary work suggests that states with more capacity for organizational learning a likely to be more responsive than others to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. On the issue of national security, Peterson finds indirect links between higher HIV/AIDS prevalence and lower indices of socio-economic well-being that, in turn, increase the likelihood of violent conflict and human rights abuses. Sell finds that advocates for health and greater access to AIDS medications have been able to shift venues for discussion and create some opportunities to push for greater access to generic AIDS drugs, despite the powerful political interests of pharmaceuticals companies. Similarly, Busby suggests that advocates of a more ambitious external response to the pandemic have succeeded, in part, because they were able to tap into the moral values in a number of target countries and appeal directly to powerful policy gatekeepers on a moral basis, as much or more than a purely self-interested one. He finds that the the U.S., the UK, and Canada have led in contributions to external funds for AIDS, including contributions to the Global Fund and bilateral donations while Japan and Germany have been the laggards. Finally, Rich suggests that the access to external finance in Brazil has served to co-opt a number of NGOs leading them to become more service providers rather than critical outsiders.

This was an interesting set of papers which we think will set the stage and the bar for rigorous social science on the topic.

Princeton HIV/AIDS Workshop May 5th

joshbusby — Mon, 08 May 2006 15:16:08 +0000

A number of us scholarly folk met this past week at a workshop on the “Politics and Policy of HIV/AIDS” at Princeton on May 5th. Presenters included Evan Lieberman and Josh Busby of Princeton, Sue Peterson of the College of William and Mary, Susan Sell of George Washington University, Nathan Paxton of Harvard, and Jessica Rich of Berkeley. David Gartner, Policy Director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a Washington advocacy group also provided comments as a practitioner.

We focused on a number of the challenges for conducting research on the topic, the paucity of good data in particular. We also addressed some of the core questions in the study of HIV/AIDS including:

why some countries have been more responsive than others in addressing HIV/AIDS in their country (Lieberman and Paxton are working on this question in particular),
the links between HIV/AIDS and national security (Peterson’s work addresses this question),
the challenge of HIV/AIDS to contemporary models of global capitalism (Susan Sell’s work on intellectual property rights gets at this)
the relationship between NGOs, the state and HIV/AIDS (both Rich and Busby get at this)
why some donors have been more generous than others in responding to the AIDS crisis (Busby’s work focuses on this question).

Papers are temporarily available through the conference website. I’ll try to post more on this in days to come.

UC Berkeley workshop: The Global and Local Politics of HIV/AIDS

Ben — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:46:40 +0000

Wednesday March 8, 2006
Location 223 Moses

12 – 2 Panel Presentation with Lunch

Working Title: The Global and Local Politics of HIV/AIDS

Purpose: to receive public comments on paper concepts

Format: 10-15 minute presentations followed by questions

Participants: Josh, Nate, Ben, Jessica, and Ann Swidler (chair)

Op-ed: Male Circumcision Programs Should Receive PEPFAR, G8 Funding To Reduce Spread of HIV/AIDS

Nate — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 19:57:27 +0000

From the KaiserNetwork:

“Properly planned” male circumcision programs should be part of efforts supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide, a Los Angeles Times editorial says. Rates of male circumcision — which is “relatively inexpensive and can drastically reduce the transmission of [HIV/]AIDS,” — “are exceptionally low in many areas where HIV is dangerously prevalent,” including India, Asia and southern Africa, according to the Times. One-quarter of men globally have undergone circumcision, the editorial says (Los Angeles Times, 2/10). A study published in the November 2005 issue of PLoS Medicine of men living in South Africa finds that male circumcision might reduce the risk of men contracting HIV through sexual intercourse with women by about 60%. (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 10/26/05). Male circumcision might also reduce the risk of HIV transmission from HIV-positive men to their female partners, according to a study of couples in Raiki, Uganda, presented on Wednesday at the 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 2/9). Some countries including Botswana and Swaziland have begun instituting adult and infant male circumcision programs following the 2005 South African study, the editorial says. There are growing waiting lists at clinics performing the procedure, the editorial says, adding that this might lead men seeking circumcision to rural doctors where they risk “dangerous and even deadly infections.” If preliminary findings from two circumcision trials in Kenya and Uganda are similar to those in the South African study, the U.S. and other donor countries “should help increase access to a safe and affordable procedure that has gone out of favor in most of the world,” the editorial says. The Times adds that information reinforcing the importance of safer sex also should accompany any male circumcision program, as there is concern that men who are newly circumcised may engage in “risky behavior” (Los Angeles Times, 2/10).

On HIV/AIDS Treatment in the Developing World

joshbusby — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:51:34 +0000

I am preparing for a presentation tomorrow for World AIDS Days, December 1st, for Princeton’s student group the Student Global AIDS Campaign. It is affiliated with Princeton’s AIDS initiative. I’m talking about the adequacy of donor response to the epidemic. I’ll have more to post about my talk tomorrow, but I ran across a line in a recent UNAIDS report assessing resource needs to combat the disease over the next three years. On page 28 of the report, the estimated additional years lived for people with AIDS who are on antiretroviral therapy is between 4 and 6 years and 6-9 years in low- and middle-income countries. Without treatment, it is estimated those people would die within the year. How does that compare with additional years lived in richer countries? I guess I assumed that the retroviral therapy could extend the lives of people in developing countries for much longer. I guess it doesn’t make me feel much better that those folks will die four or five years later than they otherwise would. That means dying at 35 instead of 30 for a lot of them. Perhaps some good years but still a truncated life.

two Robert Wood Johnson funding possibilities

Nate — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 23:14:14 +0000

I know that RWJ focuses on domestic policy, but I’m pretty sure that
Evan Lieberman’s crossnational study is somehow funded by them. This
leads me to think that there might be to frame our project so that it
fits the framework of at least one of the grants below. (The first
grant, “Changes in Healthcare Financing and Organization”, doesn’t
explicitly mention the U.S. The second grant, “Investigator Awards in
Health Policy Research”, does mention relevance to US policy, but
depending how how loosely they intrepret the guidlines, I think that we
might make a good case for out project’s relevance to US policy.)

What do you think?

Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization
This
program requests proposals for policy analysis, research, evaluation,
and demonstration projects that provide public and private decision
leaders with usable and timely information on health care policy and
financing issues.

To view a National Program Report on this program, please go to http://www.rwjf.org/reports/npreports/changese.htm

Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research – 2005

This
program funds highly qualified individuals to undertake broad studies
of the most challenging policy issues in health and health care facing
America.

All applicants must download and complete an Application Summary Sheet

Program Area:
Building Human Capital
,

Public Health