President Emergency Plan for Aid Relief - Essay Example

PEPFAR must be understood and evaluated within this context; as a public policy whose intent is the treatment and control of the AID epidemic.

PEPFAR, the largest and most ambitious healthcare initiative in history came into being on January 1st, 2003. In response to ever-increasing concerns over the social, political, and economic consequences of AID, the United States passed PEPFAR into public policy/legislature and declared a 15 billion dollar commitment to the policy.

While PEPFAR is dedicated to the fight against AID as a global epidemic, its primary focus is upon the 15 countries which have the highest incident rates, those being Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia.

Public bill 108-25 outlines PEPFAR’s aims and objectives, further establishing its mechanisms and strategies for service delivery. As clearly outlined in PB 108-25, PEPFAR’s AID-combat philosophy is governed by the ABC principle, or the “Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms” model, whose effectiveness has, since 1986, been established upon implementation in all of Uganda, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and Senegal.

PEPFAR’s immediate objectives are the provision of Antiretroviral treatment to approximately 822,000 people living with HIV in the previously mentioned focus countries,  expected to increase to 2 million, the extension of care to a total of 10 million, and the prevention of approximately 7 million new infections. It is, in other words, an ambitious and much-needed program for the treatment and provision of care to over 12 million HIV cases and a strategy for the prevention of its continued spread.

While ambitious, Public bill 108-25 outlines prevention, care, and treatment delivery mechanisms and strategies that ultimately render the program realistic. Within the context of the focus countries, PEPFAR is not presented as a `foreign’ initiative but as a local and communal one. The program, therefore, is intent upon the forging of partnerships in host countries through the training of community healthcare professionals and volunteers in the PEPFAR philosophy and prevention and treatment strategies. In so doing, PEPFAR works towards the building of local capacities for the management of the epidemic through the education of community members.

The education of community members on HIV is an integral componential element of PEPFAR’s strategy to manage AID insofar as it both focuses on the infection’s associate social stigma, thereby encouraging those with HIV to seek treatment and care and educates community members on prevention strategies. Local community education, therefore, is central to the program’s success and local community partnerships are integral to its acceptance by host country populations.

At the request of the United States Congress, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) is currently evaluating PEPFAR’s performance to date.