US HIV/AIDS program hit target early

The US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has reached its target of providing treatment to two million people worldwide by the end of 2008, with over three months to spare. The scheme was launched in 2004 by President George W Bush with the aim of making a dramatic impact on the number of HIV/AIDS patients who receive antiretroviral drugs. At the time, despite years of efforts from the World Health Organization and other groups, only 50,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa had access to ARVs. The PEPFAR has raised that figure beyond two million.

In July this year, the program was amended to drop an earlier requirement that one third of funds be spent on sexual abstinence promotion, while the budget was raised from $15.0 billion to $48.0 billion per year.

Another area of complaint from anti-patent activists has been the insistence that generic ARVs deployed in the PEPFAR must be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. One counter-argument made by the UK-based development think-tank, the International Policy Network against alternative programs, which are more "generic friendly," is that these have distributed substandard products from India and elsewhere, to meet political targets.