How is anti-retroviral therapy moving around the world?
December is AIDS Awareness Month, and for this year’s occasion, I decided to take a deep dive into the #supplychain narrative surrounding one of our best and longest lasting weapons against the global pandemic — anti-retroviral therapy. The US Federal agency, USAID, organizes distribution of the medicine to a broad swath of countries where infections are very dense, and funding may not be. It’s a rather strange thing to remember prior to the HIV being discovered and reported on, to now. The stigmatization, fear, mortality rates, uncertainty, the economic toll. The parallel with the #COVID19 pandemic is not without its irony.
It’s critical to understand that the dollar values associated with each section of this dashboard relate to lives saved and families continuing to be whole because they receive these medications. Just this week, on December 1, 2021 — World AIDS Day — US President Biden announced a whole-of-society approach to ensuring that the HIV scourge is finally defeated. I wonder if we will need four decades of suffering in order to decide to vanquish the COVID-19 monster.
But you came for the dashboard, not the commentary, no? Here goes:
Starting at the bottom left and rotating clockwise. I’m actually committing a cardinal sin of dashboard building in using a pie chart with more than five slices on it. However, I think it’s particularly impactful once you start with the drill-down exercise, and the number of pie slices starts to fluctuate. What’s interesting to investigate on this dashboard as you go around the world is the comparison between generics and on-brand pricing. Not only that, the quantity of generic packages versus on-brand packages shipped in particularly telling.
The top left chart is the price of generics over time. You’ll notice immediately that — as generics go- they become fairly pricey (or is it that USAID is just buying more…?) and then the price experiences a downward shock at two points in the graph. Watching the amount spent over time per country is also quite astounding as the totals vary widely. I encourage everyone to gauge the differences over time with a watchful eye.
I’m going to wrap up the last bits quickly since I’m reaching the commonly recognized attention limit. The map is fairly self explanatory but I’ve included a few interesting details in the tool tip. The cohort study lets you know about modes of transportation, and these are not uniform for each country on the map, and that is to be expected. I couldn’t use transit mode as a filter on the dashboard (I tried,) because it kept breaking the generics pricing graph. I may need to call Mt. Flerlage Tableau Hospital for some assistance. I did, however, get the BANs across the top to modulate depending on the country, and this makes me happy. Enjoy clicking through! Let me know what you think.
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