During a recent interview with The Hill’s “Blog Briefing Room,” Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, praised former President George W. Bush for the enactment of PEPFAR and commended the Obama administration’s commitment to global health issues for “being very open minded [and] saying we don’t have to go back and reinvent the wheel.”

‘Ethical Issues Raised By PrEP Are Difficult, But Not Insurmountable’: “The AIDS movement is at a pivotal point in history, where it will face scrutiny not only to demonstrate that interventions are cost-effective and equitably distributed, but also to balance resource demands with other global health imperatives, such as maternal/child…

On the sidelines of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Monday, the General Assembly of the Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS (OAFLA) gathered to discuss the continent’s progress against HIV/AIDS, Walta Info reports.

USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah on Tuesday delivered a speech at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where he reaffirmed President Barack Obama’s commitment to the 6-year $63 billion Global Health Initiative (GHI) and discussed the USAID’s role in bolstering U.S. global health programs, CIDRAP News reports.

In an effort to avoid a government shutdown, House Republicans are drafting a new continuing resolution (CR) that will include some cuts to the federal budget, Republican leadership aides said on Wednesday, Roll Call reports (Stanton, 2/23). “The measure will contain about $4 billion in spending cuts and will merge cuts approved last week by the House and several taken from President Obama’s list of program terminations and savings,” National Journal writes. “The CR would extend government financing for two weeks” and the cuts “would be prorated to reflect” the reductions that were approved in last week’s CR. “In other words, the $4 billion in savings would be roughly equal to the cuts the CR called for if carried out for just two weeks,” the publication notes.

Federal budget negotiations continued on Thursday, “as Senate Democrats looked for targets for cuts in the remaining months of fiscal 2011 and House Republicans appeared ready to unveil a stopgap plan that would make deep reductions over the next two weeks,” CQ reports.

New Resources On Federal Global Health, HIV/AIDS Budgets: The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a collection of new resources examining global health and HIV/AIDS funding in the Obama administration’s FY12 budget proposal. A new fact sheet breaks down the $9.8 billion budget request for the Global Health Initiative (GHI), a six-year,…

The Importance Of Investing In Adolescent Girls: A Lancet editorial examines the challenges adolescent girls living in developing countries face and the work of the U.N. Adolescent Girls Task Force (UNAGTF) to help young women overcome these barriers. “This International Women’s Day, we recognise that investment in today’s population of…

Senate Democrats on Friday introduced a FY11 continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government through September, “with a vote on the measure, as well as a House-passed proposal, expected” this week, the Washington Post’s “2chambers” blog reports (Sonmez, 3/4). In a press release, the Democratic-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee “highlighted a series of significant differences between [its proposal] and the House-passed fiscal 2011 spending measure (HR 1) on the national security front,” CQ reports.

“A generation of babies could be born free of AIDS if the international community stepped up efforts to provide universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and social protection, the United Nations said on Tuesday,” Reuters reports. The declaration came on the eve of World AIDS Day, as U.N. leaders released a new report (.pdf), which found “millions of women and children, particularly in poor countries, fall through the cracks of HIV services either due to their gender, social or economic status, location or education,” according to the news service (Kelland, 11/30).