what if you saved a life and noboday cared?

how about if you saved 16 million lives?


My friend in Zimbabwe lost her college aged niece a couple months ago. She was ready to start college but died unexpectedly of an infection.

Sigh.

but the miracle was that she lived that long, because she was born of an HIV positive mother, in the days before the disease was recognized and easily diagnosed, let alone treated. Most of these children died in childhood of ordinary childhood diseases.

Her father died of HIV about that time, again in the days when there was no treatment available, and what treatment was around in the west was very very expensive, too expensive even for the African middle class.

But things changed when GWB decided to spend money to save these lives.

From PJMedia:

WASHINGTON -- The George W. Bush initiative to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa has saved more than 16 million lives so far, according to a new administration report on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

That includes 14 million men, women, and children on lifesaving drugs and 2.2 million babies born HIV-free to HIV-positive mothers.

The program has also helped 6.4 million orphans and caregivers, and provided 15.2 million men and boys with circumcision to lower the risk of HIV transmission.

Additionally, a quarter of a million medical personnel have been trained to improve care for HIV and other outbreaks.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush announced the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, as "seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many." "As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better,"

Bush said then. "Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under the age of 15. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection. More than 4 million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims -- only 50,000 -- are receiving the medicine they need."

At the time, the cost for life-saving antiretroviral treatment had dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year, "which places a tremendous possibility within our grasp," Bush said. Bush had asked Congress for $15 billion over the next five years to treat 2 million HIV patients and prevent 7 million new infections. That was the birth of PEPFAR.

this gets little publicity in the USA because Bush was a Republican, and the press is a Democratic echo box, and never sees anything good about Bush (or Trump).

the docs at the hospital where I used to work were involved in the program, and the public health sister that I worked with ran a clinic outside the capital to monitor the medicine (until Mugabe demolished the clinic and  much of the suburb in revenge LINK)

No I didn't work with this: I left my second African stint in the early 1980s. I suspect we had cases, because we had a couple cases of kaposi's sarcoma etc. but it was not recognized then, and people often died of trivial infections that we attributed to the low protein malnutrition that was common.