Obama's "Realistic" Changes to PEPFAR

In new guidelines for 2010, President Obama's PEPFAR team "opened the way to linking AIDS work with strengthening of health systems generally, taking into account the development of human resources, maternal and child health, family planning and access to it for women, gender equality, malaria and tuberculosis, food and nutrition, education and local economies," which is, "in short, a holistic and realistic policy. It will matter because the United States is the world's largest contributor to HIV/AIDS relief, and Bush [administration] restrictions have had a deadening effect on many international programs," U.N. correspondent Barbara Crossette writes in the Nation.

Some developing country policies have left "grassroots women's health work ... desperately short of money and supplies. An estimated tens of millions of women who want contraceptives are unable to get them, or may have no choice beyond crude sterilization or unsafe abortion," Crossette writes. She quotes Wendy Turnbull, a senior policy research analyst at Population Action International, who said, "This is just a start ... There is a lot of damage to undo. There is a lot of reinterpretation that needs to happen" (Crossette, 9/1).

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