Jim Kim’s role in WHO‑backed TB drug distribution and global health initiatives (2002‑2003)

In June 2002 ... the WHO adopted new prescriptions for dealing with MDR-TB, virtually the same as PIH had used in Carabayllo. For Jim Kim this marked the end of a long campaign. "The world changed yesterday," he wrote from Geneva to all of PIH. The prices of second-line antibiotics continued to decline, and the drugs now flowed fairly smoothly through the Green Light Committee to, among other places, Peru, where about 1,000 chronic patients were either cured or in treatment. About 250 were receiving the drugs in Tomsk, and, largely because of the efforts of WHO, the Russian Ministry of Health had finally agreed to the terms of the World Bank's TB loan--150 million dollars to begin to fight the epidemic throughout the country. The twin pandemics of AIDS and tuberculosis raged on, of course, magnifying each other, in Africa and Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Mathematical models predicted widening global catastrophe--100 million HIV infections in the world by the year 2010. Some prominent voices, some in the U.S. government, still argued that AIDS could not be treated in desperately impoverished places. But this view seemed to be fading. The prices of antiretrovirals were falling, even more dramatically than the prices of second-line TB drugs. This was thanks to a growing worldwide campaign for treating AIDS wherever it occurred. Jim Kim had often said that the world's response to AIDS and TB would define the moral standing of his generation. In 2003, a new director general took over at WHO, and he asked Jim to serve as his senior adviser. Meanwhile, the example of Zanmi Lasante [PIH's Haiti-based project] was growing, and Cange had become a favorite destination for global health policy makers and American politicians. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028783