http://206.65.240.13/meetings/global.pdf

Last month saw the release of two major reports on HIV and AIDS from the US government: Global AIDS Research Initiative and Strategic Plan from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Action Against AIDS: A Legacy of Leadership at Home and Around the World from the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP). Although neither document is a page-turner, together they present a solid record of what the US has achieved in the area and hopes to do in the future.

While the ONAP report is a self-congratulatory record of the Clinton Administration's AIDS-related activities, Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), says the NIH's strategic plan is “less a question of what's new,” rather it is a “plan of what we're doing internationally.” Fauci told Nature Medicine that he has “been pushing the global aspects of HIV in particular.” Now, consolidated in one place, he says there is a plan that is “setting the blueprint for a much greater [international] emphasis over the next few years.”

Within the plan are suggestions to establish centers of excellence for international collaboration, enhance translational research results and support dissemination of information, develop prevention programs, train foreign scientists, support international conferences and workshops and provide scholarships for local researchers and clinicians to attend, and organize a Global Strategy Group directed by the heads of the Office of AIDS Research (OAR) and NIAID with international representation to determine critical research priorities. Despite offering little new, even those who sometimes criticize administration AIDS policy and initiatives are pleased that the document exists. “The encouraging thing to me is that they did this at all—that they went through and thought about what we do for the international epidemic,” comments Art Ammann, founder of the California-based Global Strategies for HIV Prevention. He makes a plea for the Global Strategy Group committee being set up by the OAR with the aim of determining international research priorities to be co-chaired by a leading individual from a developing country.