Nov 8, 2011
My guest this week is Mead Over, one of the world’s leading experts on the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We discuss his new book, Achieving an Aids Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment. The key idea is simple but powerful. Mead argues that, instead of reaching vainly for the unsustainable goal of offering treatment to everyone in the developing world who needs it, donor policy should aim to sustain current treatment levels while reducing the number of new infections below the number of AIDS deaths, so that the total number of people with HIV/AIDS declines.
“The escalating number of people infected with HIV/AIDS is far outpacing available funding for treatment, especially in Africa,” Mead tells me. “Only by holding deaths down and preventing new infections will the total number of people with HIV decline and an AIDS transition be reached.”
Read a full show summary on the Wonkcast site: cgdev.org/wonkcast.