Articles

Our Opportunity Where Health and National Security Converge (Forbes)


FORBES | This week, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and I released a report recommending a policy of strategic health diplomacy, inspired and informed by the success of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).  The report’s publication was announced at a conference in Washington, DC, where many of the architects of PEPFAR came together to advocate for a foreign policy approach that incorporates health care and humanitarian aid.  The PEPFAR program has provided access to anti-retroviral treatments to more than 7.7 million men, women, and children worldwide.  It has prevented transmission of the virus to 95% of infants with infected mothers, offered care and support to millions of orphans, and trained over 140,000 new health care workers.  It is by all accounts a major success.  Yet it took many years for us to get to this point.

When I first became acquainted with the AIDS virus, I was a surgical resident in Boston in 1981.  At that time it was still an unexplained illness with only a few documented cases.  I never would have predicted the scourge that HIV/AIDS would become.  Back then, we thought we would have a cure within a few short years.

Instead, AIDS was responsible for the deaths of 3 million people in 2003 alone, and 40 million people lived with AIDS or HIV at that time.  As a surgeon, the emergence of AIDS spurred radical changes in surgical practices.  In the early years, when I operated on a patient with HIV or AIDS, I wouldn’t require my assistants to scrub in due to the risks.

Read more at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrist/2015/11/13/our-opportunity-where-health-and-national-security-converge/#99dc1a4cdb73