Stethoscope diplomacy

[Texasmujer]

(I wasn't sure where to put this---it DOES have to do with science, though---in the end, I leave it up to the 'board where this belongs...)

A private plan to battle AIDS in Africa shows how a government (U.S. A.) has faltered---and can do better.

Not all U.S. ambassadors send cables or do business within swank official residences. This week Baylor College of Medicine joined Bristol-Meyers Squibb to announce a program for 250 doctors who, in their own way, will be potent diplomats for the Unitred States abroad. The medical school and pharmaceutical giant have launched a $40 million program to treat children with AIDS throughout the developng world.

Dubbed an "AIDS Peace Corps,," the initiative will train and fund U.S. physicians to treat 80,000 African children over five years. The doctors will train African doctors an provide technical suppport for host governments to scale up treatment for regional or national populations. The initiative, for which Baylor is supplying $10 million and Briston-Meyers Squibb $30 million, constitutes a "village-by-village" battle against the pandemic, according to Mark Kline, chief of Baylor's international network of pediatric clinics.

The deployment of doctors should also be seen as a crucial diplomatic effort in a region well-aware of U.S. economic might---but far removed from American constructive power. The Peace Corps analogy is apt in several ways. The goal is to empower healthcare workers to eventually sustain their own peograms in the often complex and intimidating work of pediatric AIDS treatment. The U.S. doctors will return with insights and skills they can apply.

The U.S. government should adopt the Peace Corps spproach to AIDA. In fact, Dr. Ritzhugh Mullan, professor of peiatrics at George Washington University, proposed just such an approach to the Bush Admnistration in April.

The strategy does more than get AIDS treatment to children quickly, Mullan said in a telephone interview. "The notion of establishing a corps where the government would commit to an increased number of individuals in a coordinated fashion...would send a very impoortant signal that the medical professionals to battle this global threat," he said.

But while two private institutions have briskly turned this concept into action---they plan to have doctors on the ground in Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Malawi by next summer---the administration's has not acknowledged his report, Mullan said. Unfortunately, this inaction is in keeping with the administration's delayed AIDS project for Africa, announced two years ago. Promising $15 billion a year over 5 years, Bush requested only $2 billion the first year, $2.8 billiion this year and #3.2 billion for next year. Nearly a year and a half passed before the plan was put into action.

Baylor and Bristol-Meyers have launched an admirable and decisive attack on pediatric AIDS clinic by clinic. The administration needs to follow them with fast and massive action---country by country. The world is watching and each hour in Africa another child will die.