Brazilian Approach to AIDS

Essay # 59786

Latin-American Studies
Medical and Health > Public Health Issues
Public Administration

This paper discusses the Brazilian approach to fighting AIDS and evaluates the possibility of applying this model to the United States and other countries.

2,820 words () | 11 sources | MLA | 2001 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper explains the political process that led the Brazilian government to provide persons infected with HIV with the drugs needed to stave off the virus, giving the individual's body time to rebuild its immune system, thus stabilizing the growth of the disease within the population. The author points out that, in Brazil, any patient can walk into a government clinic, certify, and get the drugs made by the government, free of charge; whereas, in the United States, AIDS drugs are provided through the complexity of the health care infrastructure and funded by a variety of methods such as private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, and private organizations. The paper relates that the global, commercial drug companies are fighting the Brazilian program because the price of their drugs is 72% higher than the price of the Brazilian drugs produced under the government program. Graphs.

From the Paper:

"The search across space and time for a solution to this problem may not have been a conscious thing. The simple glance at a newspaper article can spark the imagination and thus inspire a lesson to be drawn. Certainly, in America, we like to think of ourselves as leaders. When the title of an article proclaims a foreign nation to be a world leader, some attention is owed the topic. The question of whether the program would work in the U.S. or not must be answered second to the question of whether we should even look to Brazil in the first place. Using a matrix used by Richard Rose to test the initial question the answer may be yes."