Limited funding, lack of flexibility forces decisions on how to spend money on disease treatment

Noting "the total clinic-level cost of providing a year's worth of antiretroviral drugs ... ha[s] dropped" in some countries, Charles Kenny, a fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation, discusses "disagreement over the effectiveness of the global AIDS response" in this Bloomberg Businessweek opinion piece. Kenny highlights a debate that took place last week on the sidelines of the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) that "focused on the question: should we use resources for antiretrovirals at a cost (including overhead) of perhaps $350 per patient per life year saved if we could use those resources to provide a course of drugs to cure victims of tuberculosis at a cost of $5 to $50 per life year, or of extending childhood immunizations at the cost of $2 to $20 per life year?" He writes, "Simply, millions of people are dying unnecessarily, for lack of $350 a year or less. It may be those who don't get AIDS treatment, or those that don't get other treatments because the available money is being used to buy antiretrovirals." He continues, "If anything could open treasury accounts in the rich world to provide a larger flow of resources to global health, perhaps it is to get policymakers in those countries to think through these gut wrenching decisions that limited funding (and lack of funding flexibility) forces doctors and ministers and activists alike to make every day" (7/27).