JaBbA's Hut

Back in 2001, Federal officials went on the record saying that the AIDS Drug Regimens weren't going to work in Africa because the people in africa don't use clocks:

Comments made by Andrew Natsios, the head of the US Agency for International Development, and an unnamed senior Treasury official quoted in the New York Times, closely parallel an episode of NBC- TV's acclaimed "West Wing" series aired on Oct. 25, 2000.

In the episode titled "In This White House," a fictitious US official, involved in negotiations between an African head of state and a pharmaceutical company, asserts that taking the drugs is a "complicated regimen that requires 10 pills to be taken every day at precise times."

"What's the problem?" asks Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff character played in the series by actor Bradley Whitford.

There is a long pause in the Roosevelt Room.

Finally, communications director Toby Ziegler (actor Richard Schiff), says, "They don't own wrist watches. They can't tell time."

Natsios, in an interview last week with the Globe and in testimony before Congress, also argued against spending much money on providing antiretroviral drug treatment in Africa, telling the House International Relations Committee:

"People do not know what watches and clocks are," Natsios said. "They do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun."

In the April 29 edition of the New York Times, the unnamed Treasury official said Africans lacked a requisite "concept of time," implying that they would not benefit from drugs that needed to be taken on a precise schedule.

Well, a new study out of Kampala, Uganda, and reported on NPR shows that the problem isn't the lack of clocks - Actually, when the participants were paying for their own medicine, their following of the treatment regimen was at least as good as in the western world. They used the alarms on their cellular phones.

Just another example of the deep research and global awareness of compassionate conservatism.