Global Health Care Issues
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- Category: Politics
- Date Submitted: 03/24/2010 11:23 PM
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Addressing the Importance of Health Care and What Further Actions can be taken on the International Scale for Developing Countries
According to Garrett, the revolution started in 1996 as an international AIDS meeting in Vancouver, Canada. It was at this meeting that scientists introduced the extremely benefits to ART and how they can improve a person’s quality of life and increase their lifespan period (others would later argue that ART would not be as successful in sub-Saharan Africa because they do not have a concept of time and part of the keys to ART is TIME—any missing dose can have drastic effects on a person’s overall health and could potentially allow the HIV strain to mutate and become drug-resistant). Since the conference and practically overnight, tens of thousands of men and women in wealthy countries started the new treatments and by mid-1997, the visible horrors of AIDS had almost disappeared entirely in the United States and Europe.
The downside to ART is that it’s overwhelmingly expensive and because of its price, developing countries almost didn’t even stand a chance to afford it at the time. Priced in 1996 at about $14,000 a year while still requiring $5,000 a year for tests and medical visits, the treatment just was unaffordable for the majority of the HIV-infected world population. Because of this, between 1997 and 2000, a worldwide activist movement slowly but surely developed to address this problem by putting pressure on drug companies to lower their prices or allow the generic manufacture of the new medicines. The activists demanded that the Clinton administration and its counterparts in the G-8, to pony up money to buy ART and donate them to poor countries. And by 1999, total donations for health related programs (including HIV/AIDS treatment) in sub-Saharan Africa hit $865 million—up more than tenfold in three years (Garrett, 17; Pfeiffer 12).
While it may seem great that the world recognized in the late 1990s the importance to...
According to Garrett, the revolution started in 1996 as an international AIDS meeting in Vancouver, Canada. It was at this meeting that scientists introduced the extremely benefits to ART and how they can improve a person’s quality of life and increase their lifespan period (others would later argue that ART would not be as successful in sub-Saharan Africa because they do not have a concept of time and part of the keys to ART is TIME—any missing dose can have drastic effects on a person’s overall health and could potentially allow the HIV strain to mutate and become drug-resistant). Since the conference and practically overnight, tens of thousands of men and women in wealthy countries started the new treatments and by mid-1997, the visible horrors of AIDS had almost disappeared entirely in the United States and Europe.
The downside to ART is that it’s overwhelmingly expensive and because of its price, developing countries almost didn’t even stand a chance to afford it at the time. Priced in 1996 at about $14,000 a year while still requiring $5,000 a year for tests and medical visits, the treatment just was unaffordable for the majority of the HIV-infected world population. Because of this, between 1997 and 2000, a worldwide activist movement slowly but surely developed to address this problem by putting pressure on drug companies to lower their prices or allow the generic manufacture of the new medicines. The activists demanded that the Clinton administration and its counterparts in the G-8, to pony up money to buy ART and donate them to poor countries. And by 1999, total donations for health related programs (including HIV/AIDS treatment) in sub-Saharan Africa hit $865 million—up more than tenfold in three years (Garrett, 17; Pfeiffer 12).
While it may seem great that the world recognized in the late 1990s the importance to...