Global Call May 28

The Supplemental Bill is going to conference committee because the Senate version is virtually unrecognizeable compared to the version the House passed.

PEPFAR is still being held up in the Senate by seven Republicans. Efforts are underway to work with "reasonable" Republican Senators to stop this block. Grassley is not on the list of Senators targeted for this effort.

Paul Farmer is going to be on the conference call June 14. According to the Harvard Medical School website, "Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer’s work draws primarily on active clinical practice (he is an attending physician in infectious diseases and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and medical director of a charity hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti) and focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. Along with his colleagues at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, Dr. Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis (including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis). Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings."