Addressing high-risk groups, couples counseling in HIV prevention

In this post in the Center for Global Development's "Global Health Policy" blog, Mead Over, a senior fellow at the center, follows up on a post last week in which he wrote that a panel of senior economists commissioned by the Rush Foundation was to address the question of how to spend an additional, but hypothetical, $10 billion on HIV/AIDS programs in Africa over the next five years. He writes that the panel's proposed interventions presented on Wednesday were the scaling up of vaccine funding by $100 million per year, the introduction of infant male circumcision, prevention of mother-to-child transmission efforts, increasing the safety of blood transfusions, and the scaling up of antiretroviral treatment (ART). He calls the list "surprising," writing, "Neither the authors nor the panelists analyze the two interventions which target populations where spillover effects and asymmetric information enhance the benefit cost ratio of interventions: High risk groups and couple counseling" (9/30).