Posts
New research refutes the concern
that concentrated HIV/AIDS funding during the last three decades has come at
the expense of other disease-fighting efforts.
The study team, led by Dr. Donald
Shepard of Brandeis University, focused on Rwanda. “The AIDS program was in the
process of being rolled out to many health facilities. So that made it possible
to do this controlled study of looking at facilities that already had AIDS
services and other facilities that were similar but didn’t - to try to see in
that country at least what the actual impact had been,” Shepard explained.
Two teams of researchers visited
each of the centers in the study, using a questionnaire to evaluate the “inputs
and outputs” of each, Shepard said. “The inputs were the staff that they had,
drugs and other items that they received, and the outputs were a series of
services that they produced, particularly in terms of visits and vaccinations,
and other types of services by health facility by year.”
“We concluded that there was no
evidence at all of the adverse effect that some researchers had feared and
speculated about — and some evidence that indeed that there were positive
spinoffs,” including the finding that health centers offering HIV/AIDS services
“provided better preventive care than those that did not, including superior
delivery of childhood vaccinations,” Shepard said.
“Rwanda has had a very deliberate
policy of integrating AIDS services into its health care system. So while from
a donors’ viewpoint AIDS has separate mechanisms - in Rwanda’s case, the Global
Fund [to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria] and [the US President’s Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief program] — within the country itself, it had made a very conscious
effort of trying to integrate AIDS into the health care system and has helped
to strengthen the health care system more generally in Rwanda,” noted Shepard.
[PNU editor’s note: The report, “A
Controlled Study of Funding for Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome as Resource Capacity Building in the Health System in
Rwanda,” was published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
(2012;86(5):902-907).]
The Friends of AIDS Foundation is
dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and
empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV
virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.
TOGETHER WE REMAIN STRONG!
