PHA-Exch> From Alma Ata to the Global Fund: The History of International Health Policy --a dissenting view

[Claudio Schuftan]

>From baker at neu.edu
  Subject: From Alma Ata to the Global Fund: The History of International
Health Policy
   I don't know how many people have yet read the paper "From Alma Ata to
the
Global Fund" but it is but one more slalvo attempting to discredit AIDS
programing, especially via the Global Fund. The first five pages of the
paper tells a coherent and politically accurate account of the rise and
fall of primary health care for all and the growing and dangerous role of
IMF/World Bank structural adjustment policies including privatization, user
fees, and disinvestments in the public health sector. It also catalogues
the long-term decline of the WHO as a normative, self-defining institution,
documenting how it too have fallen prey to donor conditionalities.

However, the analysis goes dangerously wrong when it begins to analyze the
Global Fund and priority disease programming. The paper is highly
selective in the evidence it chooses and ignores many of the collateral
health system strengthening and primary health care effects of AIDS disease
programming, both by the Global Fund and by PEPFAR. Instead of correctly
identifying strategies to increase coordination between priority disease
programs and between the plethora of public-private partnerships, it
proposes dismantling them all and returning to a never realized golden-era
of horizontal health system strengthening. Instead of recognizing the
significance of AIDS activism in quadrupling aid for healthin just a few
years, the authors engage in magical thinking that the funding could
have/would have been raised and rationally spent on health system
strengthening.

This article is interesting only in the sense that it is ultimately so
misinformed and dangerous.

Brook

Professor Brook K. Baker, Health GAP
Northeastern U. School of Law
Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy

______________________________




    ____________________
Dr. Joe Thomas, MSc. Ph.D

*Editor,  [AIDS INDIA eFORUM]  &  [AIDS ASIA eFORUM] *
Connecting key HIV & AIDS stakeholders in Asia and the Pacific
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AIDS-INDIA/
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AIDS_ASIA/
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