|
|
 |
|
| Speech |
|
|
|
Jon Cohen
The 2009 Excellence in Media Award for Global Health
Category: Newspaper, Magazine and Major Print Publication
I recently did a search for the phrase “global health” in PubMed, and the earliest hits were a 1966 paper about Canadian mobile forces in the Medical Services Journal Canada, a 1976 report in the Swedish journal Lakartidningen about blindness prevention, and then a 1979 publication in Aviation Space and Environmental Medicine about leadership in aerospace nursing. In all, there were 3,291 hits, but even by the end of 1989, the year I started intensively reporting on HIV/AIDS, there were fewer than 50 published papers that used the term.
Numbers talk. And what they’re saying here is that outside of the Canadian military, Sweden, and aerospace nursing, “global health” was not a common phrase when I started covering the AIDS epidemic.
Money talks, too, and in 1989, the available resources to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS totaled about $200 million. By 2007, when we began this project at Science— and I say “we” because my editor Leslie Roberts, who is here, and photographer Malcolm Linton put a huge effort into making this come to life, as did many others—that number had jumped to more than $10 billion. That’s a 50-fold increase.
How and why had this happened? And where was the money going? Those were the main questions behind the package of stories called “Follow the Money.”
The largesse of the wealthy world was not driven by an upswing in empathy and the sudden recognition that poor countries needed help to stave off massive death and disease. HIV/AIDS had moved to the top of the agenda because of an ardent and organized advocacy community, and anti-HIV drugs had shown spectacular success, first in preventing mother-to-child transmission and then in allowing infected people to rise from their death beds, changing a fatal illness into a chronic condition. The World Bank launched the Multi-Country HIV/AIDS Program. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation came out of nowhere to become the largest philanthropist. PEPFAR came out of nowhere, too. And The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was established. All of this happened between 2000 and 2003.
When I looked closely at the money, dramatic stories surfaced. Although the new money clearly was saving lives, prevention efforts badly lagged behind treatment. Huge disparities existed: Several countries with severe HIV/AIDS epidemics received relatively little assistance, while some less affected donor darlings seemed awash in money. Widespread pilfering of Global Fund grants in Uganda had gone unprosecuted. Botswana could not spend all of the money that the Gates Foundation and drug-maker Merck offered, and even though it had made great strides against the virus with enlightened political leadership, the country recognized that it could not maintain the massive treatment effort it had started.
Now that’s a lot of negativity, and you might say, well, he’s a journalist. But that’s not fair. We look for conflict, be it positive or negative. And in the world of HIV/AIDS, conflict is success against the virus, which always is surprising. So we highlighted research projects that had great bang for buck. We toasted the watchdogs who had kept their eyes on the money. And we recognized the great strides each of the major donors had made to deliver on their promise and remain accountable.
The move from millions to billions of dollars has revamped the response to HIV/AIDS—and HIV/AIDS has changed Global Health, helping to make it a common phrase, and leading the way for many other disease movements. But HIV/AIDS also has to lead the way in assessing impact, in the architecture of the response, and in sustainability. And I hope this package of stories makes that plain.
At the end of the day, this project took substantial resources, too. Science magazine and the extraordinary news editor Colin Norman, especially in these dire times for many publications, deserve high praise for investing in this. I also received a mini-fellowship from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which made travel to Uganda, Kenya and Botswana possible.
No story would exist without the help of sources, and I much appreciate the substantial assistance I received from UNAIDS, the Global Fund, WHO, the Gates Foundation, the NIH and too many people to mention in the countries I visited.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to the Global Health Council for this award. Most of us, whatever we do, rarely receive public recognition for the work that we are most proud of, and the media in particular live by the credo that you’re only as good as the last story you filed. But fleeting as the recognition may be, it means a lot to me, and to the talented, devoted people I work with at Science. Many, many thanks.
|
|
|
