MB Civic

Lola Dare, Jim Yong Kim & Paul Farmer | December 1, 2006 | The Washington Post

Three eminent AIDS leaders review the Bush administration’s plan to address AIDS in Africa, and they lay out a marvelous plan that sounds almost exactly like Bill Clinton’s: to generate a whole class of hea;th care workers with “just enough” medical training to serve as “Barefoot Doctors”, like the ones Mao Zedong used to massively upgrade and revolutionize public health in China. That’s because the real problem in AIDS care is not obtaining enough medicine, but in setting up a system for its delivery and monitoring of the patients, an infrastructure that currently does not exist. Clinton has been talking about this for almost four years (I know because I heard him speak at an international AIDS conference in February 2003). This class of workers would draw on the unemployed and underemployed in the very areas where AIDS has struck the hardest. Excellent, sensible stuff from three of the brightest minds in the field…BS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001164.html