Why haven family planning and reproductive health care been integrated with AIDS care before now?
That’s a good question. There are a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s very common to have vertical programs that deal with one kind of problem from top to bottom. A program that addresses a single health care issue, from policy and fundraising to service delivery, makes training and organization much easier. And there has always been a tension in global public health planning between this approach and a much broader, horizontal, primary-care-for-all approach. The current thinking is that you need some of both. Also, organizations that work on issues of sexually transmitted diseases typically are run by different people with different training from those who work on family planning and reproductive health issues. A final reason is that the movement to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS has been characterized by a sense that this crisis of epic proportions must sometimes be addressed to the exclusion of other health issues. Advocates were driven by activism, and that’s different from the typ
