The Center for Global Health Policy this month detailed its concerns with the Obama administration’s proposed Global Health Initiative (GHI), raising particular questions about how U.S. efforts to combat global HIV and tuberculosis would fare under this new approach to global health.

At issue is a “Consultation Document” the State Department released Feb. 1, with a call for public comments on the proposal. The Consultation Document provided some new details about the administration’s plans to implement President Obama’s proposal for a $63 billion six-year GHI, which envisions a more comprehensive approach to global health aid and a more intensive focus on child and maternal health.

In a response to the State Department in late February, the Global Center’s two co-chairs wrote that the document includes many significant and laudable goals. But the GHI blueprint falls short in key respects, the Center’s letter said, from scaled-back targets for TB treatment to murky details about funding to inadequate plans for addressing the health care worker shortage.  

This includes the disconnect between the GHI blueprint and the Lantos-Hyde legislation, which reauthorized the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Lantos-Hyde requires the president to formulate a comprehensive five-year strategy to combat global TB, including the treatment of 4.5 million new TB patients and the diagnosis and treatment of 90,000 new multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB cases. Both targets are to be reached by 2013. The GHI Consultation Document, by contrast, sets a goal of treating 2.6 million new TB cases and 57,200 multi-drug resistant (MDR) cases of TB.

“Despite the enormous death toll resulting from tuberculosis, the burden it places on the health care system, and the growing threat of drug-resistant TB, this goal is roughly half of the target set by Congress in Lantos-Hyde, and it extends over a longer time frame, six years under the GHI as compared to five years under Lantos-Hyde,” the Global Center’s response noted.

Read more about the Global Center’s analysis and other global health news at the Center for Global Health Policy’s blog, www.sciencespeaks.wordpress.com.

Recent blog highlights include:

• Live blogging from the Conference on Opportunistic Infections and Retroviruses (CROI) in San Francisco, including detailed posts on the latest HIV/AIDS science presented at the conference.
• The Global Center’s analysis of the administration’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget proposal for U.S. global HIV and TB programs.

How useful is this article?