Bloomberg examines how a trade agreement being negotiated by leaders of the nine Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries — Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States — could potentially make it more difficult for people in TPP nations to get new generic drugs and may impact U.S.-led global efforts to tackle HIV/AIDS as outlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a recent speech at the NIH.

In this post in the “Health Affairs Blog,” Matthew Kavanagh, director of U.S. policy and advocacy at Health Global Access Project (GAP), and Marguerite Thorp, a research assistant at Harvard Medical School, examine how HIV/AIDS treatment funding under PEPFAR has “fallen significantly since 2008 in both absolute dollars and as…

UNAIDS and PEPFAR on Monday at the 16th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) in Africa (ICASA) “launched a five-year action framework to accelerate the scale-up of voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention,” according to a UNAIDS press release. “The framework — developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS, PEFPAR, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank in consultation with national Ministries of Health — calls for the immediate roll-out and expansion of VMMC services in 14 priority countries of eastern and southern Africa,” the release notes (12/5).

“The amount of good our nation has done for poor and hungry people around the world over the last 10 years is astounding,” Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World; George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and former Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), a senior fellow…

“On Monday, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that will decide if recipients of government aid can be forced to oppose prostitution — or potentially any other issue as a contingency of receiving U.S. funds,” The Nation reports. “The case, Alliance for Open Society International v United…

“Supreme Court justices appeared divided on Monday as they considered a challenge to a law requiring non-profit organizations to adopt an anti-prostitution policy in order to obtain federal funding for HIV/AIDS programs abroad,” Reuters reports (Hurley, 4/22). “The disputed provision is part of a 2003 law under which the United…

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently published two reports on PEPFAR. “As PEPFAR partner countries assume greater responsibility for managing their treatment programs, fully functioning monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems are critical for tracking results and ensuring treatment program effectiveness,” one report notes, according to the summary. The report…

Citing PEPFAR, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the President’s Malaria Initiative as pieces of the “remarkable success story” of U.S. foreign aid over the past decade, former Congress member and Ambassador to Tanzania Mark Green writes in a post on the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network’s “ModernizeAid” blog, “While our budget…

Swaziland’s King Mswati III on Friday called on men in the kingdom to get circumcised to help reduce their risk of contracting HIV, Agence France-Presse reports. “Urging his nation to ‘take care of your lives – stay away from activities that could give you the disease,’ the king struck a very different note from his pronouncement to parliament a decade ago that HIV-positive people should be ‘branded and sterilized,'” the news agency writes.

In her latest piece on the New York Times’ “Opinionator” blog, author and journalist Tina Rosenberg argues that the terms of Gilead’s recent agreement with the Medicines Patent Pool is “confirmation of a dangerous new trend: middle-income countries as a target market for drug makers.” “The new strategy is to treat people in Egypt, Paraguay, Turkmenistan or China – middle-income countries, all – as if they or their governments could pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year each for AIDS drugs. This low-volume high-profit strategy might make business sense. But in terms of the war against AIDS, it means surrender,” she writes.