Foreign Policy In Focus

Compulsory licensing and parallel importing policies could help developing country governments make essential medicines more affordable to their citizens.

The U.S. is pushing a negotiating agenda for the FTAA that would dramatically limit each country’s ability to undertake compulsory licensing, an important tool to promote generic competition.

The UN estimates that Africa will need $3 billion just for basic treatment and prevention programs, yet the U.S. and other Western countries donated only $300 million in assistance in 2000.

Former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher has likened the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa to the plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century.

There are some people in the world's wealthy countries who forecast that 2005 will be a decisive year for Africa.

If the "war on terror" is beginning to look increasingly like the cold war, then President George W. Bush's fiscal year (FY) 2005 foreign-aid request will not change that impression.

Africa and AIDS activists say the Bush Administration's pledge to expedite its approval process for low-cost, generic anti-retroviral drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will really slow delivery of drugs to those suffering while undermining the authority of the United Nations and World Health Organization.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study is the most reliable estimate to date of Iraqis killed in the 18 months after the March 2003 invasion.

As the full extent of the destruction and death the tsunami wrought in South Asia becomes clear, significant aid pledges are finally pouring in.

The recent South Asian tsunami’s devastation has already claimed at least 144,000 lives, caused countless injuries and wiped out entire villages. Concern now turns to the escalating death count caused by the spread of disease.