Healthcare

This week is the 56th anniversary of the creation of disability benefits for the most vulnerable members of our society, but this achievement isn't being celebrated by everyone.

To a large degree, the International AIDS Conference under way in Washington, DC, is a celebration of life. Yes, the deadly disease continues to loom over our world, with no known cure. But HIV/ AIDS is no longer a death sentence—for those who realize that they have the disease and have access to life saving medicines. After doctors began treating HIV with powerful combinations of antiretroviral drugs in 1996, life expectancies for those infected changed from months to a full, normal span.

When members of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee meet Wednesday to mark up the bipartisan Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, S. 810/H.R. 1513, I urge them to approve this bill that validates the long standing conclusions of the majority of chimpanzee researchers that non-laboratory based research will contribute most to improving human health, is more humane and promotes chimpanzee conservation. As professor of evolutionary anthropology and cognitive neuroscience at Duke University, and director of the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, I lead researchers studying chimpanzees in African sanctuaries, the wild and U.S. zoos. The majority of chimpanzee researchers are like us and do not conduct research in the obsolete U.S. chimpanzee laboratories. Research groups like mine exist at Duke, Emory, U Penn, UCLA, UCSD, Michigan U, Yale, and Harvard to name a few.

HIV/AIDS will pass into history when current scientific breakthroughs are delivered to scale rapidly, effectively and efficiently to our friends, our loved ones, and our communities at large.

We’re getting closer, but we’re not close enough.

That is a billion dollar question when we face other competing priorities like heart diseases, diabetes, maternal health, and cancer. The political leaders are talking about AIDS free generation. Whether this is possible or not is another debate but it is a laudable goal. It is possible to have 15 million AIDS patients on treatment by 2015, thus ensuring close to universal access to treatment we dream of. There is also huge cry for more funds. The International AIDS Conference in July 2012 will debate this and other issues. However, serious rethinking must be done and each donor must ask, Is funding for HIV/AIDS sufficient? I think it is. Here is why?


In 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's special cabinet committee on AIDS made a fundamentally important decision which changed the course of the emerging HIV epidemic in the UK. In spite of some vocal opposition, it decided there should be clean needle exchanges for injecting drug users (IDUs) to prevent the spread of HIV.
 


When AIDS caught the world unaware in the early 1980s, we were forced to respond to a complex emergency we didn’t fully understand. Thirty years later, we have a much better understanding of the science behind the disease, and what is required to control and prevent it.

A battle is brewing on Capitol Hill around global health and development. High-powered lobbyists are being hired and lines are being drawn.  That insider strategy is needed not because there is a partisan split; it is needed precisely because of the strong bipartisan consensus across the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations on the right approach for what President Bush called – and hosted a White House Summit on - “a New Era in Development.”

A snapshot of the current state of America’s health landscape from the Centers for Disease Control Health Disparities and Inequalities Report paints a very bleak picture. The report indicates that approximately 38 percent of African American women with coronary heart disease die before the age 75, compared to only 19.4 percent of Caucasian women. The statistics are far worse for African American men with coronary heart disease, with close to 62 percent dying before the age of 75 – a number that exceeds Caucasian men’s rate, which currently stands at 41.5 percent.

Although the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it’s still unclear whether we can truly afford the provisions in the law. Congress passed, and the President signed, the ACA with the promise that it wouldn't add to the federal deficit. Even after the Supreme Court decision, however, the only true debate now is over how much it will add to the deficit.