Lois Quam, executive director of the Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI), talked about GHI projects and “defended the program even if her panel was met with some hard questions” during a presentation on Tuesday at the annual Global Health Council conference in Washington, D.C., GlobalPost’s “Global Pulse” blog reports.

Ambassador Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, said that a recent $75 million pledge from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chevron and Johnson & Johnson could help “eliminate new HIV-infected children by 2015 and keep mothers alive,” McClatchy/News & Observer reports.

“We are entering a new era in HIV prevention. PEPFAR promoted a ‘combination prevention’ strategy from the beginning. But the tools were limited. Scientific advances could give individuals the ability to determine the prevention intervention that works best for them. Preliminary mathematical models suggest that combining a full range of prevention interventions is additive – and could drive the epidemic down to a manageable level so that when a vaccine is available, it could mop up what remains,” former U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Mark Dybul writes in a Huffington Post opinion piece.

“The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) produce a devastating level of chronic disability in sub-Saharan Africa, with some estimates suggesting that the NTD disease burden exceeds tuberculosis and is one-half that of malaria,” Julie Noblick and Richard Skolnick of George Washington University and Peter Hotez of the Sabin Vaccine Institute write in a PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases editorial. With noted relationships between the prevalence of NTDs and HIV, the diseases “demand a public health response from the established global HIV/AIDS community, in parallel with efforts to scale up NTD control,” they argue.

With recent scientific advancements in HIV prevention “transforming the way we think about AIDS,” PEPFAR’s “task is to translate new science into policy to inform programs,” U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby writes in a post on the State Department’s “DipNote” blog. “To do this, we are working with the…

In a post in USAID’s “IMPACTblog,” Kristen Wenz and James Orlando of USAID describe a July 14 webinar that was the first in the PEPFAR/USAID Social Service Workforce Strengthening series, which is “intended to encourage the sharing of information, expertise and promising practices for addressing the needs of the social welfare workforce…

The IDSA Center for Global Health Policy and the HIV Medicine Association recently released a policy statement (.pdf) responding to the results of the HPTN 052 study sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at NIH, which found that people with HIV who received immediate antiretroviral therapy (ART) were more than…

Democratic and Republican House members at a press briefing on Thursday formally introduced the first-ever bipartisan Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, along with its funding proposals, the Washington Independent reports. Through the caucus, led by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), “59 Democrats and Republicans have united in pledging to spend more money for research and prevention efforts to combat the spread of AIDS domestically and worldwide,” according to the news service (Resnick, 9/15). “Prior to Thursday, similar groups in Congress contained only Democrats,” the Huffington Post notes (9/15). According to CQ HealthBeat, “the launch came as advocates also worry about the impact of actions by the deficit-cutting super-committee that could affect research, treatment and health care related to HIV/AIDS” (Norman, 9/15).

The Center for Global Health Policy’s “ScienceSpeaks” blog features an interview with Caroline Ryan, director of technical leadership at the Office of U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC), where she has worked for seven years. Ryan discusses PEPFAR program implementation, circumcision as an HIV prevention tool and balancing efficiency with the…

In this post in LA Progressive, Georgianne Nienaber, an investigative and political writer, examines the potential effects of reduced PEPFAR funding and highlights the non-denominational Christian ACTS clinic operating in South Africa as an example of a U.S. foreign aid success story. She writes, “At ACTS, PEPFAR funding supports a…