Reauthorizing PEPFAR, Curbing Drinking, and Changing Drug Use

Editor's Note

The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program is up for reauthorization. The program remains the largest financial commitment of any country to the treatment of a specific disease and one of global health's great successes—saving over twenty-five million lives. Support for PEPFAR has been historically bipartisan, but the hyper-partisan congressional environment could derail reauthorization this year. In our first article, Jennifer Kates and Kellie Moss assess what will happen if the United States' signature initiative on global health is not reauthorized.

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have long been neglected in global health policy and funding, but alcohol could be the most neglected NCD risk. We interview Juan Tello, leader of the World Health Organization's alcohol unit, on the institution's efforts to reinvigorate progress against most common preventable cause of global mortality, which is implicated in more than three million deaths each year.

For a generation, Peru and Colombia were at the front lines of the war on drugs. Our next author examines recent policy shifts in those countries away from prevention and deterring drug production and toward a model that sees people who use drugs as "citizens, not as patients or criminals."

The average life expectancy for Dalits—India's lowest caste—can be up to fifteen years less than that of other groups in the country. Closing out the week, our last author discusses why India's caste system is still a barrier to health care for many Indians and the programs that could help overcome it.

As always, thank you for reading.—Thomas J. Bollyky