United States global health policy: HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

Abstract

The Obama administration has unveiled a new 6-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative. In addition to the reauthorization of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to fund HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, the plan also supports maternal and child health (MCH) initiatives that are rooted in a proposal known as the Mother and Child Campaign. The architects of the Obama administration's Global Health Initiative recommend funding the Mother and Child Campaign at the expense of future funding increases for PEPFAR. The idea that differing global health initiatives must compete with each other lacks not only ethical legitimacy but also scientific merit. We believe that MCH need not to be framed in opposition to PEPFAR. Confronting illness in isolation - whether by funding PEPFAR at the expense of programs that target MCH or vice versa - cannot be our way forward. Given the intimate connection between HIV/AIDS and MCH, we affirm supporting PEPFAR and MCH programs together. We argue that policies that de-emphasize PEPFAR threaten to undermine, rather than support, MCH in countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence. PEPFAR has directly and indirectly supported the care and treatment of other milieu specific diseases, including those afflicting mothers and children, bringing about broad benefits to the primary healthcare systems of recipient countries. We advocate the vertical integration of MCH initiatives into PEPFAR in order to create a comprehensive approach to addressing MCH against the global backdrop of HIV/AIDS.