AIDS Aid (Maybe)

In my last post (“Thanksgiving”), I wrote about the progress reported recently by Bionor, a small Norwegian company, in testing its therapeutic vaccine for HIV/AIDS (Bionor Nov PR).  Given that yesterday was World AIDS Day, I thought I would continue in that vein and look at the other (too few) companies that are working on [...]

Thanksgiving

The existence of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the disease it causes, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), is a good demonstration of the capability of evolution to find exceedingly successful designs.  As a retrovirus, HIV becomes a permanent feature of the infected person’s genome.  It infects and kills slowly immune system cells, the helper T [...]

Knickers in a Twist

A few AIDS aid advocates have their knickers in a twist.  Back in December 2009, the executive board of Unitaid, the Swiss-based drug access and global health advocacy organization (Unitaid), approved an implementation plan, two yeas in the making, for a “Medicines Patent Pool” intended to facilitate the licensing of HIV/AIDS drugs and decrease their [...]

I’d Love to Change the World

This week two sound bites from the 18th (or in superbowlish:  XVIII) International AIDS Conference underway in Vienna (AIDS Conference) caught my ear.  The first was our former president Bill Clinton who was widely quoted in the media:  “In too many countries, too much money goes to pay for too many people to go to [...]

Access to Medicines/Access to Markets

When I attended BIO 2010, Biotechnology Industry Organization’s annual gabfest with 15,000 others in Chicago May 3-6 (BIO 2010), I was disappointed at not being able to attend a special session on May 5.  The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), represented by Inder Singh, their director of drug access, and BIO Ventures for Global Health [...]

Too Much Alarm (and Not Enough Cow) Bell

Since global health topics rarely make the newspapers, I read with interest an article in the Boston Globe recently that reported a “sharp email warning” to a Ugandan clinician to stop enrolling patients in his HIV/AIDS treatment program due to the US government’s concern that the treatment program costs too much (Globe article).  Unfortunately, the [...]