Obama Nominates New Global AIDS Coordinator
by Jodi Jacobson, Editor in Chief, RH Reality Check
April 27, 2009 - 9:37pm (Print)
President Obama today announced he would nominate Dr. Eric Goosby as the new Ambassador at Large and Global AIDS Coordinator. The Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) resides within the Department of State and is responsible for overseeing all U.S. global AIDS policy and funding, including global AIDS work of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services, among others. If confirmed, Goosby will replace former Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul.
Goosby, a medical doctor, has been CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation since 2001. He is also Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has played a key role in the development and/or implementation of HIV/AIDS national treatment scale-up plans in South Africa, Rwanda, China, and Ukraine. His expertise, according to the White House press release, is in:
[T]he development of treatment guidelines for use of antiretroviral therapies, clinical mentoring and training of health professionals, and the design and implementation of local models of care for HIV/AIDS. He has worked closely with international partners on the development of successful HIV/AIDS treatment and treatment-based prevention strategies for high-risk populations.
During the Clinton Administration, he also served as deputy director of the White House National AIDS Policy Office and director of the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Goosby's nomination comes at a critical time for US global AIDS programs. Congress reauthorized the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2008 (the original law authorized programs from 2003 through 2008). But due to the current economic crisis, it is not yet clear whether Congress will fully fund PEPFAR programs this year.
Moreover, numerous restrictions within U.S. global AIDS law continue to undermine efforts to prevent the spread of HIV infections through sexual transmission in the general population and among sex workers. The new Global AIDS Coordinator will need to work quickly to strengthen efforts to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV, reduce the vulnerability of women and girls to HIV infection, meet the needs of adolescents for comprehensive sexual health education and services, lift the prohibition on purchasing contraceptives under PEPFAR and strengthen integration with reproductive health programs, and stop the spread of HIV among users of intravenous drugs and among men who have sex with men.
Hopefully, Goosby understands these challenges and is prepared to take them on.
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Here this part in the report was pleasant:
“What we have found is that the disproportionate emphasis on abstinence and fidelity has led to the destruction of a comprehensive approach,”
said William A. Smith, the vice president for public policy at Siecus, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Mr. Obama lobbies useful business - and it pleases...
All of us well we remember scandalous history with adoption of the African child, after these events the queen of pop and has decided to shoot social film about problems of Malawi, the country with the most beautiful picturesque landscapes and the greatest in the world death rate from AIDS.
About AIDS the improbable quantity both art is removed, and documentary films, therefore in the subject plan the picture of the Madonna has not told and has not shown to the spectator anything new. Many, probably, think, that about this problem is told and retold so much, that it does not require any more an illustration. The social cinema, called to cause in the spectator pity, compassion, desire to help, often does not cause any emotions as its urgency loses the force near to every day problems of each separate person. After all even the most global accidents, the most scale tragedies occurring day by day, but somewhere it is very far, in other terrestrial hemisphere, lose any sense and all horror in comparison with personal sorrows of each of us. When there are people who put public values above own well-being, we are confident, that they "act on public" and simply overact. And in many cases it is valid so.
