David Dickson

For several years, the United States Agency for International Development has been under growing pressure to adopt a more long-term approach to its support of science and technology in developing countries. The agency now supports a wide spectrum of activities, but many feel that all these could benefit from a more coherent commitment.

Even a seasoned political operator like Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair will have found it difficult to swallow the relative failure of this year’s Group of Eight (G8) summit meeting to produce any significant movement on the issue of climate change. Blair began his campaign for a different outcome more than a year ago, when he took over the presidency of the G8 group.

More than six million children die each year in the developing world from diseases that could be prevented by simple interventions. While effective mechanisms for getting the result of biomedical research to the patients who could most benefit from it remains near the top of the priority list, little research is invested in the ‘how’.

Disappointing results of clinical trials for a promising pair of new Aids vaccines have highlighted the dilemmas faced by those determining strategy in this field. Recently, a prominent Kenyan newspaper carried the headline "Aids vaccine trials flop". The following day, the same newspaper carried a second news story, this time with the headline "Search for Aids cure ‘not a flop’". At first sight, the two headlines appear contradictory.

Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila has ratified an Act bringing the country’s truth and reconciliation commission into being. The Act comes within weeks of hostilities that culminated in the seizure and pillage of Bukavu by renegade forces. Post-conflict transformation isn’t possible in the DRC, a country still at war with itself.

There was both bad and good news for delegates preparing for the International Aids Conference in Bangkok. The bad news took the form of yet another warning of the potential threat of the disease to developing countries, and of the dangers of complacency. The good news came from two papers in the scientific literature, both indicating that the costs of treating Aids patients need not be as high as widely feared.